Making a C++ app scriptable

Question

I have several functions in my program that look like this:

void foo(int x, int y)

Now I want my program to take a string that looks like:

foo(3, 5)

And execute the corresponding function. What's the most straightforward way to implement this?

When I say straightforward, I mean reasonably extensible and elegant, but it shouldn't take too long to code up.

Edit:

While using a real scripting language would of course solve my problem, I'd still like to know if there is a quick way to implement this in pure C++.

Answer 1

You can embed Python fairly simply, and that would give you a really powerful, extensible way to script your program. You can use the following to easily (more or less) expose your C++ code to Python:

• Boost Python
• SWIG

I personally use Boost Python and I'm happy with it, but it is slow to compile and can be difficult to debug.