# Introduction

[SIP](https://pypi.org/project/sip/) is a Python bindings generator for C and
C++ libraries.  It takes as its input a set of `.sip` text files that describes
the history of the API of the library.  A `.sip` file is similar to a C/C++
header file but with addional directives, annotations and supplementary
hand-written C/C++ code.

MetaSIP (specifically the `msip` application) is a GUI tool for specifying the
complete history of a library's API allowing additional directives, annotations
and hand-written code to be added.  A `.msp` project file is used to store this
information and MetaSIP (specifically the `msipgen` application) can generate
an appropriate set of `.sip` files to feed to SIP.

The key feature of MetaSIP is that it can scan the header files of a particular
version of a library in order to initially populate the project file.  It will
then indicate all of the tasks that might need to be performed in order to
complete the implementation of the bindings.  It will also scan a new version
of the library, compare it with the previous version, update the project file
appropriately, and indicate any new tasks that now might need to be performed
in order to keep the bindings up to date.  These features make it relatively
easy to maintain the bindings for a large library.

Currently the scanning of a library's header files is done using
[CastXML](https://github.com/CastXML/CastXML) and this must also be installed.

MetaSIP is hosted at [GitHub](https://github.com/Python-SIP/metasip).

The documentation is hosted at
[Read the Docs](https://metasip.readthedocs.io).

MetaSIP is licensed under the BSD 2 clause license.