Bridging Python to C++- and vice-versa

I found myself in need of good access to C++ functionality from Python. By good I mean: more than sim-ply being able to call C++ routines or methods, but also the ability to subclass C++ baseclasses in Py-thon, and subclass Python baseclasses in C++, similar to the functionality PyObjC [1] provides when you need interoperability between Python and Objective-C. The objective is tackled by extending the standard (but little known:-) bgen bridge to be able to parse C++ headers, teaching it about C++ objects, inheritance and callbacks and exposing the result as a Py-thon extension module. There are various other solutions that allow you to automatically generate Python interfaces to C++ li-braries, but I could not find any that I really liked: most are lacking in functionality, such as bidirectional subclassing, some are bloatware, some are ugly. So in good open source tradition I decided to try and do better. At the time of writing (October 2005) this is still work in progress, so this paper will focus more on the solutions chosen than on the actual tool. The proble