Have you used pybind? I've used SWIG extensively so I'm familiar with that - you talked about SWIG but not how it compares to this new one.
Reading through some docs, it looks like pybind suits better for a python codebase that occasionally needs C++ pieces added in as you have to setup the C++ code to handle the py needs.
SWIG I was always impressed with exactly your point. You could sometimes just make 1 big header file in a facade pattern to expose some "start" buttons needed to run a huge c++ application and nothing else needed to be setup. No going back and forth.
Example usage here was a single heavy duty image processing application but using python has the distributor and work manager. C++ code was a "worker" and python and zeroMQ did everything else. So the only "connection" we needed was a start button and some metadata to the c++. Maybe 1 header file with 100-200 lines of code to make the bridge for SWIG.
(to anyone else reading) does that sound trivially simple to the do the same with pybind?
SWIG is amazing. I have usually taken a different approach so that I could get the scaling you talk about.
I point SWIG at the real headers in my projects and use ifdefs to block out things don't want SWIG to see. There are also a few rules that should be followed when doing this. Things like: don't let SWIG see overloads if the other language doesn't support them; don't return raw pointers that need to be deleted; don't let swig see std headers, etc...
Then I make SWIG (optionally) run as part of the build. Any warning it makes need to be resolved somehow because CI will reject commits causing warnings. It cost just a little more dev time, but prevents eons of debugging time.
I haven't used pybind yet, so I can't compare the two unfortunately. From how I understand the docs it seems you would have to write the interface definitions in C++ and the compiler would generate the bindings for you, which sounds like a nice approach that could be a bit more cumbersome though as (again, in my understanding) forces you to write and adapt all bindings by hand.
Reading through some docs, it looks like pybind suits better for a python codebase that occasionally needs C++ pieces added in as you have to setup the C++ code to handle the py needs.
SWIG I was always impressed with exactly your point. You could sometimes just make 1 big header file in a facade pattern to expose some "start" buttons needed to run a huge c++ application and nothing else needed to be setup. No going back and forth.
Example usage here was a single heavy duty image processing application but using python has the distributor and work manager. C++ code was a "worker" and python and zeroMQ did everything else. So the only "connection" we needed was a start button and some metadata to the c++. Maybe 1 header file with 100-200 lines of code to make the bridge for SWIG.
(to anyone else reading) does that sound trivially simple to the do the same with pybind?