2022-07-27 –, Blue
Interporability of Julia with C++ is essential for the use of the Julia programming language in fields with a large legacy of code written in this language. We will show how the generation of a Julia interface to a C++ library can be automatized using CxxWrap.jl and a tool that generates the required C++ glue code. The concept is demonstrated with a prototype called WrapIt!, https://www.github.com/grasph/wrapit, based on clang and which is already well advanced.
Interfacing Julia with C++ libraries can be done with the help of the CxxWrap.jl package. With this package bindings to C++ classes, their methods and to global functions with a clean Julia interface can be easily be implemented. To provide the bindings, a wrapper that defines the C++-Julia mapping must be written.
We will show in this talk that this wrappper code can be automatically generated from the C++ library source code. A code generator, called WrapIt! (https://github.com/grasph/wrapit) and which was developped as a proof of concept will be presented.
The clang libraries (https://clang.llvm.org/) was used to interpret the C++ code and in particular its C API, libclang. The tool is already well advanced. We will show the challenges that represents deducing the library interface direcly from the C++ header files, in particular for large libraries with hundreds or thousands of C++ classes, the technical choices made in WrapIt!, the status of this tool, and what would be need to make it a full-fledged wrapper generator.
Philippe Gras is a physicist working at the Institute of Research of the Fundamental Laws of the Universe (Irfu). He is using Julia in the context of his research, to analyze data from High Energy Physics experiments.