Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Wrapping GetLocationID from IOUSBLib

[Brendan S. (eTRIX) <Bre...@eT...>]

Ronald Oussoren wrote:
> 
> On 23 Jun, 2009, at 3:23, Brendan Simon (eTRIX) wrote:
>> I had a quick look at ctypes and not sure if it can be used to access
>> ObjC variables, functions, etc.  I'm not sure if there is a way to build
>> a C (or C++) wrapper around the ObjC code and then use ctypes.  I
>> presume it's possible but it's getting complicated :(
> 
> Neither wrapping using ctypes nor wrapping using PyObjC will be easy. 
> You access functionality of "objects" from IOKit using function pointers
> in the "object" struct. That should be easy enough to write in ctypes,
> but PyObjC has no real support for that. On the other hand, PyObjC has
> support for CFString and other CoreFoundation types while ctypes hasn't.
> 
> BTW.  IOKit is not an Objective-C based framework, but is a plain C
> framework that makes use of CoreFoundation.


Thanks Ronald.

I've had a look at libusb-1.0.2 it is written in C and makes IOKit calls :)

PyUSB (0.x) uses ctypes to interface to libusb-0.1.12. PyUSB has just
started a new 1.0 branch to use libusb-1.x.y, and as such there is no
release yet.

So it seems that the best solution for me is to take the libusb code,
and either extend/modify it to provide the info I need.
I can use PyUSB or my own ctype interface to get a python interface.

So I think I will skip the PyObjC exercise for now, although I really
like the project.  If IOKit support was added to PyObjC that would be
really really useful :)

Thanks for everyone's help,
Brendan.