Automatic generation of C++ -- Julia bindings

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.