[sword-devel] Python bindings for libsword with SIP

[Troy Melhase]

> We have had the occasional bug in SWIG that has been worked around
> (particularly in SWIG's iteration over STL types, which has the
> unpleasant side effect of occasionally causing access violations).
> It's also worth considering the overhead of converting types like
> SWBuf to native Python types, since some of the buffers have lots of
> text in (not that I'm claiming SWIG is efficient).

I hadn't considered that the overhead would be large, so instead of
guessing, I wrote a little test script to time it.  The best of 3 runs
for each:

$ python quick-test-speed.py SWIG
SWIG render time: 14.32

$ python quick-test-speed.py SIP
SIP render time: 15.90

The script is only loading the KJV module and calling RenderText() on
each verse, but at least for this case, the SWIG bindings are 10%
faster.  Test script attached.

Also, I originally wrote the script to increment the module using the
+= operator; this gave me glibc errors at the end of each run using
the SWIG bindings.  When I changed the script to use increment(),
those errors went away.

troy
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