SIP (software)
| Original author(s) | Phil Thompson |
|---|---|
| Written in | C, C++ |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| License | GPL and other |
| Website | riverbankcomputing |
SIP is an open source software tool used to connect computer programs or libraries written in C or C++ with the scripting language Python. It is an alternative to SWIG.
SIP was originally developed in 1998 for PyQt — the Python bindings for the Qt GUI toolkit — but is suitable for generating bindings for any C or C++ library.
SIP takes a set of specification (.sip) files describing the API and generates the required C++ code. This is then compiled to produce the Python extension modules. A .sip file is basically the class header file with some things removed (because SIP doesn't include a full C++ parser) and some things added (because C++ doesn't always provide enough information about how the API works).
In terms of how the generated code works then I don't think it's very different from how any other bindings generator works. Python has a very good C API for writing extension modules - it's one of the reasons why so many 3rd party tools have Python bindings. For every C++ class, the SIP generated code creates a corresponding Python class implemented in C.
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