What is Direct?

Compiling or Editing the Panda Source
1

What is Direct? Hypotheses:

  • its code that needs to go somewhere, and its easier to write it in Python than in C++?
  • its code thats necessary for the Python/C++ interface layer?
  • its something to do with using Panda on a server?
  • something else, or a combination of these things?

Hugh

2

I think your first hypothesis is the best. :slight_smile:

3

Officially, it is a layer of Python-dependent high-level tools that are built on top of Panda. Panda itself is intended to be scripting-language independent (even though we only support Python at the moment), but Direct is unabashedly Python.

David

4

Yes, its definitely raising the question in my mind: if scripting languages abstract the underlying implementation, what abstracts the scripting languages???

Maybe there should be something swig-like for Python modules :smiling_imp:

I guess it would be sufficient to wrap the Python wrappers in C, then use swig on top of that.

Should drink less coffee really.

More seriously: how can I find out what are the specific things that are carried out by Direct? How critical are they to an application?

Hugh