Are there any plans (or interest in) making a Julia interface for VTK?

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Are there any plans (or interest in) making a Julia interface for VTK?
I use VTK from Python a lot, and the bindings are great … the bindings for Julia are essentially nonexistent other than write-your-own (which, when I am doing it, is not-so-great).

The Julia bindings that presently exist are very narrow in purpose.

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Ok completely gratuitous, I just wanted to make a markdown poll (haven’t ever done that before). If there were a Julia binding for VTK, would you use it?

  • yes
  • no

0 voters

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Have a look at the wrapping tool code for Python and Java bindings and you’ll get an idea about what is required.

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I, for one, would be very interested in it. @toddy Is there any documentation about these tools? The wiki is very old and I would like to understand more about it and see how much work it’d take. The fact that Julia uses multiple dispatch rather than being pure OO might be also a problem (?)

Francesco

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I have tried wrapping some C++ with Julia, and started to get an idea of just how big of an issue that was. There are some tools in Julia like Cxx.jl, and a lower level package, Clang.jl that save you the trouble of parsing the C++ “manually”. I’m interested enough to help, but I’m pretty new to Julia.

I’m also getting a better appreciation of the work that folks here have put into the bindings for other languages!

I think that the wrapping part of VTK can be seen here.

1 Like
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Unfortunately there’s no documentation that I know of.

It looks like you can call c code from Julia so it should be possible to wrap VTK. Calling C and Fortran Code · The Julia Language

You can have a look at
VTK\Wrapping\Tools vtkWrapJava.c and vtkWrapPython.c