go-python

Naive 'go' bindings towards the C-API of CPython

this package provides a go package named "python" under which most of the PyXYZ functions and macros of the public C-API of CPython have been exposed.

theoretically, you should be able to just look at:

http://docs.python.org/c-api/index.html

and know what to type in your go program.

this package also provides an executable "go-python" which just loads "python" and then call python.Py_Main(os.Args). the rational being that under such an executable, go based extensions for C-Python would be easier to implement (as this usually means calling into go from C through some rather convoluted functions hops)

Install

With Go 1 and the go tool, cgo packages can't pass anymore additional CGO_CFLAGS from external programs (except pkg-config) to the "fake" #cgo preprocessor directive. So one has to do instead:

 $ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/sbinet
 $ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/sbinet
 $ git clone http://github.com/sbinet/go-python
 $ cd go-python && make

or (if you are into one-liners):

$ CGO_CFLAGS="-I/usr/include/python2.7" \
  CGO_LDFLAGS="-lpython2.7 -L/usr/lib" \
  go get github.com/sbinet/go-python

Note: you'll need the proper header and python development environment. On Debian, you'll need to install the python-all-dev package

Documentation

Is available on godoc:

http://godoc.org/github.com/sbinet/go-python

Example:

package main

import "fmt"
import "github.com/sbinet/go-python"

func init() {
   err := python.Initialize()
   if err != nil {
          panic(err.Error())
   } 
}

func main() {
 	 gostr := "foo" 
	 pystr := python.PyString_FromString(gostr)
	 str := python.PyString_AsString(pystr)
	 fmt.Println("hello [", str, "]")
}

$ go run ./main.go
hello [ foo ]

TODO:

• fix handling of integers (I did a poor job at making sure everything was ok)

• add CPython unit-tests

• do not expose C.FILE pointer and replace it with os.File in "go-python" API

• provide an easy way to extend go-python with go based extensions

• think about the need (or not) to translate CPython exceptions into go panic/recover mechanism

• use SWIG to automatically wrap the whole CPython api ?