poly-scribe

poly-scribe is a software environment designed to facilitate easy (polymorphic) data structure serialization, deserialization and exchange between different programming languages. The intend is to provide a type-safe and similar interface across multiple languages, allowing developers to work with data structures without worrying about the underlying serialization format. This is achieved by generating code based on a common interface definition. For this purpose, poly-scribe uses WebIDL (Web Interface Definition Language) to define the data structures. The generated code can then be used in various programming languages such as C++ or Python. As such, a simple call to a load and save function will serialize and deserialize the data structure to and from a file respectively.

To simplify the process of generating code, poly-scribe provides a python package called poly_scribe_code_gen as well as a CMake function to generate code for a C++ project.

For more information on how to write WebIDL definitions and what the generated code looks like, please refer to the Quick Start Guide. For more detailed information on the code generation process, please refer to the Code Generation API.

Implementation

C++

For C++ the generated code uses a thin wrapper library around the reflect-cpp library.

Python

For Python the generated code uses the pydantic library to provide a type-safe interface for the data structures.