Sealang— BeeWare

Sealang is an improved set of Python bindings for libclang.

The upstream maintainers of libclang have not been especially responsive to patches that address issues like Python 3 compatibility, and the significant omissions in the API (such as extracting literals and operators).

This package is a fork of the official Python bindings for libclang, patched to correct these problems.

How it works

Sealang is a bit of a nasty hack. libclang is a set of C bindings to a C++ API; Python ctypes are then used to wrap the C API. However, while the C++ API is quite rich, libclang is less so.

Sealang bridges this gap by providing C wrappers around the C++ calls that provide the useful functionality. This library of C functions is wrapped up as a Python C module for delivery purposes - this C module contains no exposed Python objects or methods, but because it's a module, the underlying compiled sealang.so file is easy to find. ctypes are then used to expose the sealang wrapper functions;

Internally, Sealang reproduces some minor pieces of the libclang API; these are methods (such as the string creation and manipulation methods) that aren't exposed as symbols for third-party use.

All this functionality is potentially a candidate to be passed upstream to libclang.

Relationship to Clang

This project aims to mirror what is currently available in the Python bindings to libclang. The version number for this project is drawn from the version and SVN revision of the official clang repository.

Any changes made upstream to libclang will be mirrored here; any changes made here will, where possible, be pushed upstream to libclang.

Development status

This project was an experiment developed to support Seasnake. Since Seasnake has been abandoned, so has this project.