[bbb]

5. Any type of bit twiddling sucks. Take the time to do it in C and make the extension.

I recently had to do something like this and ended up using SWIG to generate the glue code. However, I noticed that my code had to spent considerable time (many iterations) in the C++ library to reduce overall execution time (but then it did by a factor of 20x-40x).

Do you happen to have some advice on how much speedup could be gained by replacing SWIG with handwritten wrappers?

[sophacles]

My personal preferences are: Boost.python for C++[1], and Pyrex/Cython for C wrappers. Both make things pretty nice. I never really got into swig, so I'm not sure if there is noticable speedup betwen any of these. As for handwritten wrappers, I have not had any personal experience trying to eke the extra speed from not using a code generator type wrapper. hth

[dagw]

Swig solves a somewhat different problem than Boost.python/pyrex. Swig works better when you have an existing C++ codebase you want to call from python while making as few changes to the C++ side as possible, while Pyrex/Boost work better when you are writing a C or C++ module from scratch to be called from python.