Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why not use an existing solution (eg, SWIG)?

   Their type systems don’t support run-time, user provided refinement types, and thus are unsuited for verification & validation use cases that often arise in computational science.

   Furthermore, they tend to not handle C++ dependent types well (i.e. vector<T> does not come back as a np.view(..., dtype=T)).

2. Why Clang, GCC-XML, or pycparser and not my favorite AST?

   XDress has a very nimble system for supporting external parsers and syntax trees. If you’d like to see your favorite one supported please let us know!

3. Why is xdress skipping my templated methods?

   If you are using GCC-XML, this parser is not able to find template member functions on either templated or normal classes. Luckily, through the Power of XDRESS!, you can still automatically expose this functionality by adding the templated function API to a sidecar file. If you are having problems with this process please let us ask for help on the xdress mailing list. You can find more information about the GCC-XML deficiency on this mailing list post.

4. I run xdress and it creates these files, now what?!

   It is your job to integrate the files created by xdress into your build system.