[stochastic_monk]

I find pybind11 [1] to be perfect for my C++ code. There's so little boilerplate, and I get RAII-guaranteed memory safety and all the speed my C++ development can bring.

For example, the binding of an accelerated HyperLogLog implementation only requires tiny amount of work, plus a line in my Makefile:

  PYBIND11_MODULE(_hll, m) {
      m.doc() = "pybind11-powered HyperLogLog"; // optional module docstring
      py::class_<hll_t> (m, "hll")
          .def(py::init<size_t>())
          .def("clear", &hll_t::clear, "Clear all entries.")
          .def("resize", &hll_t::resize, "Change old size to a new size.")
          .def("sum", &hll_t::sum, "Add up results.")
          .def("report", &hll_t::report, "Emit estimated cardinality. Performs sum if not performed, but sum must be recalculated if further entries are added.")
          .def("add", &hll_t::add, "Add a (hashed) value to the sketch.")
          .def("addh_", &hll_t::addh, "Hash an integer value and then add that to the sketch.");
  }

[1] https://github.com/pybind/pybind11

[fnl]

If working in C++ land, I'd agree this is the nicest approach. It does, however, require linking against a specific libpython version [1], unlike Milksnake. But I'm not sure that's a bad thing...

[1] http://pybind11.readthedocs.io/en/master/basics.html#creatin...

[stochastic_monk]

True. It's not that bad, though -- "python3-config --extension-suffix" or "python-config --extension-suffix" is all it takes to generate the suffix you want, and you can drop it straight in your site-packages folder. At that point, you're just dropping the 3 or not depending on your version.

It's not as simple as milksnake. I would like to see some smarter extensions added to pybind11, but I'm okay with that for now.