Menu
I keep seeing people writing wrappers for, say a module written in X language to use it in Y language. I wanted to know the basics of writing such wrappers. Where does one start from? My question here is more specific for libgnokii, how do I begin to write python bindings for it.
854
A wrapper is just some smallish class whose purpose is to provide a different interface than the thing it wraps. For example, it is common to take a C API and write one or more classes that "wrap" it to provide an object-oriented interface rather than a procedural one. Copy link CC BY-SA 2.5.
Wrapper libraries (or library wrappers) consist of a thin layer of code (a "shim") which translates a library's existing interface into a compatible interface. This is done for several reasons: To refine a poorly designed or complicated interface.
In a nutshell, SWIG is a compiler that takes C/C++ declarations and creates a wrapper needed to access those declarations from other languages like Python, Tcl, Ruby etc. It normally required no changes in existing code and create an interface within a minute. Building interpreted interface for existing C programs.
A wrapper function is a subroutine (another word for a function) in a software library or a computer program whose main purpose is to call a second subroutine or a system call with little or no additional computation.
You can start with reading this: extending python with c or c++ And then when you decide that it's too much hassle, you can check out swig or possibly Boost.Python. ctypes may also be useful.
I've done manual wrapping of c++ classes and I've used swig. swig was much easier to use, but in the end I wanted to do stuff that wasn't easily done (or I was just too lazy to figure out how). So i ended up doing manual wrapping. It's a bit of work but if you know a bit of C, it's very doable.
65
You can start by looking here for information on extending Python with C. You'll probably want to think about how to translate libgnokii's API into something Pythonic while you're at it. If you don't want to do a lot of work, you can just write a thin wrapper that translates all the gnokii API calls into Python functions.
40
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
