C++ ♥ Python: from modules to hybrid applications

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Quickstart

Open the index.html inside the slides directory for the slides. Check the code directory for all the examples from the talk.

Description

Extending Python with C is a technique that many popular modules use for OS-level operations, serialization, performance, and more, but dealing with C code is not simple: you need to take care of memory, understand pointers, and write many lines of code for simple tasks. Luckily for you, there is C++.

Wait! Don't be scared!

I know maybe you heard bad stories and saw complicated pieces of C++ code, but: are you aware of how C++ has been evolving? The latest C++ standards include many goodies that smell a bit of Python, and I will show them to you.

During this talk, you will learn how to include C++ features into CPython modules, how to create hybrid applications, and even to extend existent C++ applications with Python, making them scriptable.

This talk is intended for developers who are familiar with Python and know basic C, but you don't need to know any C++ to take the most out of it.

Audience

This talk is for Intermediate Python developers that are keen to know more details about C++. I expect the audience to be familiar with Python and a bit of C, but not necessarily know how to code in C++ since I will include small C++ snippets that will be explained in detail. Complementary to that, if the audience know a bit of C++, they will follow more easily the code and will take home the possibility to create hybrid applications. I expect the audience to learn how to write their first CPython module with C++, but also to understand how to extend C++ applications with Python

Outline

• Motivation
  • How to deal with performance issues in Python,
  • Modules that use other languages (NumPy, Pandas, PyTorch, etc),
• Introduction to C++
  • Basic concepts,
  • Evolution of the language,
  • Highlighted C++11, 14, 17, and 20 features
• Creating a CPython module with C++
  • fastglob a C++ implementation of the glob module with std::filesystem
  • fastmath a C++ implementation of the math.sqrt function with std::transform
• Extending a C++ application with Python
  • Creating Python bindings from a C++ library,
  • Embedding a Python interpreter into a C++ application,
  • Run-time interaction of a Qt/C++ desktop application with Python,
• Final remarks
  • Additional std:: modern features to include in Python modules,
  • Brief comments on extending Python with other languages