nanobind

If not doing anything edge-casey, nanobind[0] is extremely pleasant to use. It’s a rewrite of pybind11 specifically designed for the 80/20 use-cases and solves the long compile times. I have used it extensively over the last year in atopile[1] if someone is looking for a real-world production code example. We are using nanobind paired with hatch & scikit-build. I suggest having a look at the pyproject and src/faebryk/core/cpp. [0] https://github.com/wjakob/nanobind [1] https://github.com/atopile/atopile

Yes, when I designed the API I wanted to keep a clear distinction between Python and C. At some point I had two APIs: 1 in Python and the other in high-level C++ and they both shared the same low-level C API. I find this design quite clean and easy to work with if multiple languages are involved. When I'll get to perf I plan to experiment a bit with nanobind (https://github.com/wjakob/nanobind) and see if there's a noticeable difference wrt ctypes.

Take a look at https://github.com/wjakob/nanobind > More concretely, benchmarks show up to ~4× faster compile time, ~5× smaller binaries, and ~10× lower runtime overheads compared to pybind11.

People should not take that an endorsement of Swig. Please use ctypes, cffi or https://github.com/wjakob/nanobind Beazley himself is amazed that it (Swig) is still in use.

There's nanobind by the same author as pybind11 that's even faster: https://github.com/wjakob/nanobind

I would recommend considering using NanoBind, the follow up of PyBind11 by the same author (Wensel Jakob), and move as much performance critical code to C or C++. https://github.com/wjakob/nanobind If you really care about performance called from Python, consider something like NVIDIA Warp (Preview). Warp jits and runs your code on CUDA or CPU. Although Warp targets physics simulation, geometry processing, and procedural animation, it can be used for other tasks as well. https://github.com/NVIDIA/warp Google Jax is another option, jitting and vectorizing code for TPU, GPU or CPU. https://github.com/google/jax