SIP is a Python bindings generator for C and
C++ libraries. It takes as its input a set of .sip text files that describes
the history of the API of the library. A .sip file is similar to a C/C++
header file but with addional directives, annotations and supplementary
hand-written C/C++ code.
MetaSIP (specifically the msip application) is a GUI tool for specifying the
complete history of a library's API allowing additional directives, annotations
and hand-written code to be added. A .msp project file is used to store this
information and MetaSIP (specifically the msipgen application) can generate
an appropriate set of .sip files to feed to SIP.
The key feature of MetaSIP is that it can scan the header files of a particular version of a library in order to initially populate the project file. It will then indicate all of the tasks that might need to be performed in order to complete the implementation of the bindings. It will also scan a new version of the library, compare it with the previous version, update the project file appropriately, and indicate any new tasks that now might need to be performed in order to keep the bindings up to date. These features make it relatively easy to maintain the bindings for a large library.
Currently the scanning of a library's header files is done using CastXML and this must also be installed.
MetaSIP is implemented with Python and PyQt6.
It should be noted that MetaSIP was developed a number of years ago by the author as a personal productivity tool. As a result it is fairly feature complete. However because it has not been used by a significant number of people, its behavour may seem quirky in places. It is certainly poorly documented with no online help.
The documentation can be found at Read the Docs.
MetaSIP is licensed under the BSD 2 clause license.
To install msipgen, run:
pip install metasip
To install the additional dependencies required by the msip GUI development
tool, run:
pip install 'metasip[gui]'
Python sdists and wheels can be created with any standard Python build frontend.
For example, using build an sdist and wheel will be created from a checkout in the current directory by running:
python -m build --outdir .
The documentation is built using Sphinx, myst_parser and the sphinx-rtd-theme theme.
Change to the docs directory of a checkout and run:
make html
The HTML documentation can then be found in the _build/html subdirectory.