Hi all,
I have written some physics simulation code in C++ and parsing the input text files is a bottleneck of it. As one of the input parameters, the user has to specify a math function which will be evaluated many times at run-time. The C++ code has some pre-defined function classes for this (they are actually quite complex on the math side) and some limited parsing capability but I am not satisfied with this construction at all.
What I need is that both the algorithm and the function evaluation remain speedy, so it is advantageous to keep them both as compiled code (and preferrably, the math functions as C++ function objects). However I thought of glueing the whole simulation together with Python: the user could specify the input parameters in a Python script, while also implementing storage, visualization of the results (matplotlib) and GUI, too, in Python.
I know that most of the time, exposing C++ classes can be done, e.g. with SWIG but I still have a question concerning the parsing of the user defined math function in Python:
Is it possible to somehow to construct a C++ function object in Python and pass it to the C++ algorithm?
E.g. when I call
f = WrappedCPPGaussianFunctionClass(sigma=0.5)
WrappedCPPAlgorithm(f)
in Python, it would return a pointer to a C++ object which would then be passed to a C++ routine requiring such a pointer, or something similar... (don't ask me about memory management in this case, though :S)
The point is that no callback should be made to Python code in the algorithm. Later I would like to extend this example to also do some simple expression parsing on the Python side, such as sum or product of functions, and return some compound, parse-tree like C++ object but let's stay at the basics for now.
Sorry for the long post and thx for the suggestions in advance.
