Question

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.

Answer 1

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.