Introduction

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 and this must also be installed.

MetaSIP is hosted at GitHub.

The documentation is hosted at Read the Docs.

MetaSIP is licensed under the BSD 2 clause license.