Python bindings using cppyy (was: An update on Python bindings)

[Kevin Kofler]

Shaheed Haque wrote:
> As promised, here is an interim update on the investigation into the
> use of cppyy-based bindings for KF5 (and more...) instead of SIP-based
> bindings.
> 
> The first thing is that the underlying technology of cppyy,
> cling/ROOT, has been under development at CERN for quite a while. It
> directly reads regular C++ files (there is no intermediate format like
> SIP).

Unfortunately, if I understand correctly, it does that at runtime, lazily 
generating bindings only when needed the first time. They explicitly 
advertise that as a feature. But, in addition to the performance concerns I 
have with that, it turns deployment into a nightmare. It means we cannot 
just ship precompiles bindings in the distros, but our users will have to 
install the whole LLVM stack, and a special forked version at that (so it 
cannot even be shared with other LLVM users such as 
Mesa/Gallium3D/llvmpipe).

ROOT is a huge bloated framework that is not exactly reputed for its 
simplicitly to package.

        Kevin Kofler