So I woke up this morning to my google feed recommending the article Is NumPy Faster than Python? and the first thought through my head was “uhhh … why is that even a question?”. I later realized that this was a follow up to the author’s previous article called “Should You Jump Python’s Ship and Move to Julia?”. Upon more investigation it was clear that the author (whose name is Emmett) is a Julia evangelist and he seems very competent in Julia but based on the articles maybe relatively new to python.

In this post I break down in detail the various challenges of wrapping a C++ library in python using pybind11 (you can find the result pyOpenKarto here) to get a pleasant python interface. It contains examples of how to do various things which I had to dig through the documentation to find, so I’m hoping it can help out a weary traveler or two. Note that this is focusing solely on Linux (specifically Ubuntu but that only affects package names).