SWIG VS JavaCPP

Or take a look at the tools CppSharp or SWIG, s.a. Example for SWIG to wrap C++ library in .Net 6.

Do what DropBox did for many years. DropBox wrote a blog post about how they used to share their core C++ systems code between their apps. Eventually they gave up and decided it was easier to just write the same code twice, once in Java and once in Swift. However, they went about doing this in a very bizarre way, using their own custom build tooling and whatnot. In particularly, they tried to share C++ data types between Android and iOS via manually generated language bindings via stuff like SWIG. I don't recommend their approach, but it is an approach, so I feel like it's worth mentioning.

This sounds a bit like SWIG. You give SWIG an "interface file" describing the API of a library, and it uses that to spit out a bunch of language-specific bindings for that library.

Try out http://www.swig.org/

SWIG

Check out the site www.swig.org it will answer several of your questions. XS code is specific to Perl that you have to know how to code and use. SWIG takes code from C and C++ (actually several languages) and uses code templates to generate all the XS code for you. I wrote both a C library and C++ library doing different things, and used SWIG to import them into Perl (via "use"), Python and PHP. There is a learning curve, but it's not that bad, and there is a lot of great documentation and examples on the SWIG site.

Ohhh alrightt I went through the installation of pypodofo. 1. Install podofo library. For example in archlinux, pacman -S podofo 2. Install swig tool. Note, you should have installed gcc and g++ compilers 3. Build wrapper. python setup.py build 4. Copy dynamic library to python package. cp build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.7/_api.cpython-37m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so pypodofo/ 5. Install requirements. pip install -r requirements.txt (if possible in a virtualenv). 6. Run tests. nosetests tests/

Another option is SWIG, but I don't like it too much.

* I was using SWIG (http://www.swig.org/) 15+20 years ago to bind C/C++ to Perl and Java and it still exists.*

I've used it. It took the entire thing you want to call and generated one giant file of munged C. That's sort of where that idea takes you.

But the author is on to something. There's a C to Rust translator. It sucks, because it works by emulating C pointer arithmetic in unsafe Rust, using its own set of primitives along the lines of "offset this pointer by this much". Now you have ugly, unsafe Rust.

What's needed is something that infers the meaning of an ambiguous function call from the code. Something that reasons like this:

Function call:

    int read(char* buf, size_t n)

Here is the code for JNI, which uses the prebuilt JavaCPP library to call the getpid function. We don't have to write all the manual C binding code and rituals as the JavaCPP library already does it.

Javacpp is the best ffi library of all https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp

As for our approach, we maintain a library called javacpp: https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp which proves a python wheel like experience where we distribute natively optimized c/c++ code (and even cuda accelerated code) as jar files on maven central. We also are able to develop with a python like experience by passing pointers around and other low level constructs directly allowing optimizations that you typically only get in c/c++.

https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp

* it maps naturally and efficiently many common features afforded by the C++ language and often considered problematic, including overloaded operators, class and function templates, callbacks through function pointers, function objects (aka functors), virtual functions and member function pointers, nested struct definitions, variable length arguments, nested namespaces, large data structures containing arbitrary cycles, virtual and multiple inheritance, passing/returning by value/reference/string/vector, anonymous unions, bit fields, exceptions, destructors and shared or unique pointers (via either try-with-resources or garbage collection), and documentation comments*

I did not try myself, but for JNI maybe this could make lives easier? https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp