Re: [Pyinline-discuss] PyInline direction

[Thomas H. <tho...@io...>]

> > 1. It wold be cool if the generated C-code would contain
> > #line directives pointing into the correct location
> > into the python source file, but I doubt that it is
> > possible to do it automatically.
> 
> Great idea. It will take some work to implement, though, so let's write it
> down for implementation during the next month or so.

The idea I have so far is to insert the C code in a function in this
way:

C("""
int foo(void)
{
    return do_something();
}
""")

and the C function could be something like

def C(code):
    import sys
    lineno = sys._getframe(1).f_lineno
    return "#line %d\n" % lineno + code

This way is not bullet-proof:

print C("spam")

works correctly,

print C(
        "spam")

does not.
> 
> > 2. Currently you automatically wrap C-functions
> > by parsing their header. This is (nearly) trivial
> > for simple argument and return types, but impossible
> > for structured types. How will this be handled?
> 
> I'm planning to implement a Python equivalent of Neil Watkiss'
> Inline::Struct module for Perl. Inline::Struct lets you define C structs
> which are automagically turned into Perl dictionaries when they pass into
> Perl land (and vice versa).
Another great way would be to use Jack Jansen's bgen.
This is a module for generating the complete source code for
Python extension modules. Seems to be used quite extensively
for MacPython, although it is not Mac specific.

You write manual functions in the following way:

bgen.ManualGenerator("function_name", """
    if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(.....)
         return NULL;
    ....
    return _res;
""")

The function header is created automatically.
Or, better yet, create a Python interface function wrapping a C function like
  int fib(int i)
in this way:

c_int = bgen.Type("int", "i")
bgen.FunctionGenerator(c_int, "fib", (c_int, "n", InMode))

which will automatically create the following source:

PyObject *spam_fib(PyObject *self, PyObject *args)
{
    int n;
    if (!PyArg_ParseTuple(args, "i", &n))
        return NULL;
    return Py_BuildValue("i", fib(n));
}

Best is, bgen allows to easily create new Python types
in the extension module!
Looks much easier than SWIG!
The only problem so far is that there are no docs...

----

All in all, I have a lot of ideas, but different from you
I know nothing about Perls inline module.

Big question is: Should we cooperate (open source development),
or do we split our efforts?

Thomas