genny VS ClangSharp

Also of interest for people might be Genny. It’s a Nim library to automate creating language bindings for other languages. Currently it supports Python, Node, and C.

https://github.com/treeform/genny

c2nim is a tool to translate ANSI C code to Nim. The output is human-readable Nim code that is meant to be tweaked by hand after the translation process. If you are tired of wrapping C library, you can try futhark which supports "simply import C header files directly into Nim". Similar to futhark, cinterop allows one to interop with C/C++ code without having to create wrappers. nimLUA is a glue code generator to bind Nim and Lua together using Nim's powerful macro. nimpy and nimporter is a bridge between Nim and Python. rnim is a bridge between R and Nim. nimjl is a bridge between Nim and Julia! Last but not least, genny generates a shared library and bindings for many languages such as Python, Node.js, C.

For those using Python, we just got our Python bindings for Pixie up onto pip. Repo here https://github.com/treeform/pixie-python

It's extremely fresh but our tests are working so consider giving it a try.

For those interested in Nim's meta-programming, we're generating those Python bindings for Pixie from our Nim code using https://github.com/treeform/genny here https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/bindings/bindi...

One of the most surprising things I learned about "clang" was how relatively poor the "libClang" capabilities are.

I wanted to write a codegen tool that would auto-generate bindings for C++ code, and it turns out that "libTooling" is the only reasonable way to get access to the proper info you need from C++.

Another alternative is "libClangSharp", from Tanner Gooding who works on C# at Microsoft.

https://github.com/dotnet/ClangSharp

Bindings for C++ are tricky due to function name mangling and also due to ABI compat, it's basically impossible to interop with a std::vector for example. Afaik the most common approach is to PInvoke thin C wrappers around the C++ functions. There are tons of binding generators for this but they aren't without problems (not worth if you have a small API surface).

3: Throwing my work away and using ClangSharpto create the bindings, unfortunately the header file for the shared library lists other C library's that I can not find online such as > #include

I've found this to be true, with the exception that a few people have taken to "augmenting" libclang with extra bindings to libTooling functions or other C++-only methods.

Most notably is Tanner Gooding & Co's "libClangSharp" from the Microsoft "ClangSharp" project, and PathogenDavid's "Biohazrd" libraries (which again are a sort of enhanced fork based on ClangSharp):

  https://github.com/microsoft/ClangSharp  # See "/sources/libClangSharp"

If you want to go down that route, clangsharp can do this for you.