This binding passes the vips test suite cleanly and with no leaks, so it's getting close. The docs still need updating, it could use a little polish, and it currently fails with python3.
To convert old code, replace the lines:
import gi
gi.require_version('Vips', '8.0')
from gi.repository import Vips
with:
import pyvips Vips = pyvips
Instead of the pyvips = Vips, you can also swap all Vips for pyvips with eg.:
%s/Vips/pyvips/g
This is supposed to be an experiment with making a libvips binding using cffi.
http://cffi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ref.html
The Python binding included in libvips works, but porting and installation are more difficult than they should be.
We've made a libvips binding for luajit:
https://github.com/jcupitt/lua-vips
Python's CFFI is based on luajit's ffi interface, so perhaps we can steal some of it.
The hope is that a new Python binding on top of cffi would be:
- compatible with the current Python binding (it should run the same test suite, unmodified)
- easier to install, since the stack would be much smaller, and there would be no issues with the overrides directory
- faster, since we could implement Buffer and save some copies
- faster, since we could make it "thinner". The ffi Ruby binding is about twice as fast as the gobject-introspection one, when running the test suite
- portable across CPython, PyPy and others
- more simply portable to Windows
- easier to package for pip
Local user install:
$ pip install --user -e . $ pip3 install --user -e .
Run test suite:
$ nosetests --logging-level=WARNING $ python3 -m "nose" --logging-level=WARNING