AutoWIG: Automatic Generation of Python Bindings for C++ Libraries

Abstract

Most of Python and R scientific packages incorporate compiled scientific libraries to speed up the code and reuse legacy libraries. While several semi-automatic solutions exist to wrap these compiled libraries, the process of wrapping a large library is cumbersome and time consuming. In this paper, we introduce AutoWIG, a Python package that wraps automatically compiled libraries into high-level languages using LLVM/Clang technologies and the Mako templating engine. Our approach is automatic, extensible, and applies to complex C++ libraries, composed of thousands of classes or incorporating modern meta-programming constructs.