LibTIFF.jl VS astropy

Are there solid C interfaces that can be used?

A large part of why I started using Julia is because calling into other languages through the C FFI is pretty easy and efficient. Most of the wrappers are a single line. If there is not existing driver support, I would pass the C headers through Clang.jl, which automatically wraps the C API in a C header.

https://github.com/JuliaInterop/Clang.jl

I most recently did this with libtiff. Here is the Clang.jl code to generate the bindings. It's less than 30 lines of sterotypical code.

https://github.com/mkitti/LibTIFF.jl/tree/main/gen

The generated bindings with a few tweaks is here:

https://github.com/mkitti/LibTIFF.jl/blob/main/src/LibTIFF.j...

One could be a project for accuracy. By integrating physical models and with the inspiration of existing important projects like Skyfield or Astropy, this project could focus on providing the most accurate and performant results possible in Ruby. Contributors could help optimise the code, running benchmarks, and covering as many use cases as possible.

Astropy [0] lives at the heart of most work. It has a Python interface, often backed by Fortran and C++ extension modules. If you use Astropy, you're indirectly using libraries like ERFA [6] and cfitsio [7] which are in C/Fortran.

I personally end up doing a lot of work that uses the HEALPix sky tesselation, so I use healpy [2] as well.

Openorb is perhaps a good example of a pure-Fortran package that I use quite. frequently for orbit propagation [3].

In C, there's Rebound [4] (for N-body simulations) and ASSIST [5] (which extends Rebound to use JPL's pre-calculated positions of major perturbers, and expands the force model to account for general relativity).

There are many more, these are just ones that come to mind from frequent usage in the last few months.

[0] https://www.astropy.org/

Users interested in a broader range of astronomical tools beyond coordinate transformations may be interested in https://www.astropy.org/ and its affiliated packages.

I'm working on a pure Rust approximation of astropy. Up til now, I was able to recreate the intent by looking at an external API, but I'm moving on to functionality that I don't understand enough to implement without basically copying the code. Astropy uses the BSD-3 license, and it wraps the ERFA library which uses a custom license. My project currently uses the MIT license. My PR is here - my question is have I attributed everything correctly, or is there anything I need to change for everything to be above-board?

For folks who might be interested in astronomical calculations but who don't want to roll their own library, astropy (https://www.astropy.org/) is widely used by professional astronomers.