Binding Libraries: A (Performance) Comparison

[ThePhD <jm3689@...>]

Hey Everyone,

     I'm one of the authors of a wrapper library, sol2. I finally finished creating and running and comprehensive benchmark suite on several C/C++ <-> Lua wrapper libraries (including the plain C API) and I wanted to share the results here, seeing as every now and then people mention the performance of wrapper libraries and raise questions as to their efficacy.

     They can be found here: http://sol2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/benchmarks.html ( code for them lives here: https://github.com/ThePhD/lua-bench ).

     What I've found so far is that in many cases wrapper libraries can reach the efficiency of the plain C API, while providing rather neat abstractions over the underlying C code that are often easier to reuse.... For a certain defition of "neat abstractions" (some of them are fairly verbose, others a bit more slim).

     Has anyone else had any experience with binding libraries? Have they been hindrances or helpful? Was performance ever an issue for your domain? I'm curious about the experience for others outside of my userbase.

Sincerely,

ThePhD