Developer tips

Over time, we’ve collected a number of tips and best practices for working with semiwrap projects which will save you lots of time – particularly when dealing with very large projects.

Use editable installation

It is highly recommended to use editable installations when developing your semiwrap based projects. This allows in-tree editing of python files and can allow you to take advantage of meson’s incremental compilation when making small modifications.

See the pypa documentation for more information.

Use ccache

If you create a large semiwrap based project, you’ll notice that your build times can be really long. This occurs because semiwrap uses pybind11 for connecting C++ and Python code, and pybind11 relies heaviliy on C++ templates and other modern C++ techniques which cause build times to take a really long time.

From ccache’s website:

Ccache (or “ccache”) is a compiler cache. It speeds up recompilation by caching previous compilations and detecting when the same compilation is being done again.

This can dramatically improve your compile times if you’re just changing a small portions of your project. meson will automatically use ccache if it is installed.