On 4 December 2010 13:12, Matthew Brush matthewbrush@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I started working on Python plugin support for Geany. Some of the code and the general approach is based on what Māris Fogels had started at https://code.launchpad.net/~mars/+junk/geany-python-bindings.
I've put my code up at https://github.com/codebrainz/geanypy.The README file explains the concept pretty well I think and the code should be easy to follow.
The majour problem with this code right now is the Python ctypes bindings that I managed to mush out of a couple of auto-generator scripts (h2xml & xml2py which come with ctypeslib). To put it bluntly my bindings are crap.
Maris had a completely different bindings generator which might be (MUST be) better, but I couldn't figure out how to generate the bindings. Maris (or anyone else in the know), if you're on the mailing list, it would be awesome if you could give me a little help with generating your bindings.
Ultimately, the ideal approach would be to do the bindings in Cython, which in my opinion is a far superior way of doing it since it's faster and more natural for a Python programmer to use than ctypes. I'm not positive, but I think it would require having a shared library for the plugin API in order to link with the C code generated by Cython, I haven't gotten this far yet.
WARNING, I'm not an expert on this by any means & maybe a bit out of date since its a while since I did any Python embedding
I think if you declare all the Geany API functions external in Cython and follow the Pyrex recipe for embedding python (but using plugin_init instead of main) you don't need a dll of Geany. Warning this may negate some of the work you've already done.
As it stands now, the code works, loads the plugins, passes pointers to the 3 structures of GeanyPlugin, GeanyData, and GeanyFunctions, which can be accessed through some hackery to dereference the pointers in Python.
I wanted to get the opinion of some real programmers about this code and maybe some ideas about how to get the required data into a usable Pythonic API.
Cython is supposed to handle macro definitions (though I never tried) so it should work with GeanyFunctions as individual functions because of geanyfunctions.h GeanyData should work as Python structures
These should allow you to write C code in Python ie not Pythonic or OO. Then think about nicer interfaces :-)
Cheers Lex
Any input or feedback anyone can provide would be very much
appreciated.
Cheers, Matthew Brush (codebrainz) _______________________________________________ Geany-devel mailing list Geany-devel@uvena.de http://lists.uvena.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geany-devel