Re: [Rdkit-devel] RDKit Python wrappers

[Greg L. <gre...@gm...>]

My two cents:- Brian got the big one: boost allows you to produce pythonic bindings and, as long as you're doing them at the same time you are writing the original code it's not that big of a deal to write the wrappers by hand.- Back when I started this SWIG was a complete disaster in terms of how it handled C++ code.- the documentation is, IMO, much better than the SWIG documentation the moment you need to do anything that isn't fairly trivial. 
Neither is simple (the task itself is complex), but I still think that boost is the right choice for the RDKit





On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 7:09 PM +0100, "Brian Kelley" <fus...@gm...> wrote:










I expect the technical reason is that the boost wrapping was done well in advance of the swig.

Having used both, I think that boost wrappers are far more pythonic, compile faster, do docstrings better and finally handle exceptions between c++ and Python far better.

The downside is that when you get a compile error, it is several pages long.

While doing the same is possible in swig, it would require a serious rewriting that is one whole bunch of "not fun".
----
Brian Kelley

> On Dec 1, 2016, at 12:39 PM, David Cosgrove  wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> Having failed miserably to understand boost::python last week when trying to add some new functions, I am wondering if there's a technical reason to prefer it over swig?  Given there are swig wrappings for java and c#, it feels logical to do the python wrapping that way as well. It would remove some complexity from the maintenance, perhaps.  OTOH, if the end result isn't as good, then that wouldn't be worth it, and I'll just have to try harder with boost::python.
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave
> 
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