toxygen_wrapper/README.md

toxygen_wrapper

ctypes wrapping of Tox libtoxcore into Python. Taken from the wrapper directory of the now abandoned https://github.com/toxygen-project/toxygen next_gen branch by Ingvar.

The basics of NGC groups are supported, as well as AV and toxencryptsave. There is no coverage of conferences as they are not used in toxygen and the list of still unwrapped calls as of Sept. 2022 can be found in tox.c-toxcore.missing. The code still needs double-checking that every call in tox.py has the right signature, but it runs toxygen with no apparent issues.

It has been tested with UDP and TCP proxy (Tor). It has not been tested on Windows, and there may be some minor breakage, which should be easy to fix. There is a good coverage integration testsuite in wrapper_tests. Change to that directory and run tests_wrapper.py --help.

Install

Put the parent of the wrapper directory on your PYTHONPATH and touch a file called __init__.py in its parent directory.

Then you need a libs directory beside the wrapper directory and you need to link your libtoxcore.so and libtoxav.so and libtoxencryptsave.so into it. Link all 3 filenames to libtoxcore.so if you have only libtoxcore.so (which is usually the case if you built c-toxcore with cmake rather than autogen/configure). If you want to be different, then just straighten out the filenames in libtox.py.

As is, the code in tox.py is very verbose. Edit the file to change

def LOG_ERROR(a): print('EROR> '+a)
def LOG_WARN(a): print('WARN> '+a)
def LOG_INFO(a): print('INFO> '+a)
def LOG_DEBUG(a): print('DBUG> '+a)
def LOG_TRACE(a): pass # print('TRAC> '+a)

to all pass # or use logging.logger to suite your tastes. logging.logger can be dangerous in callbacks in Qt applications, so we use simple print statements as default. The same applies to wrapper/tests_wrapper.py.

Prerequisites

No prerequisites in Python3.

Other wrappers

There are a number of other wrappings into Python of Tox core. This one uses ctypes which has its merits - there is no need to recompile anything as with Cython - change the Python file and it's done. And you can follow things in a Python debugger, or with the utterly stupendous Python feature of gdb (gdb -ex r --args /usr/bin/python3.9 <pyfile>).

CTYPES code can be brittle, segfaulting if you've got things wrong, but if your wrapping is right, it is very efficient and easy to work on. The faulthandler module can be helpful in debugging crashes (e.g. from segmentation faults produced by erroneous C library wrapping).

Others include:

• https://github.com/TokTok/py-toxcore-c Cython bindings. Incomplete and not really actively supported. Maybe it will get worked on in the future, but TokTok seems to be working on java, rust, scalla, go, etc. bindings instead. No support for NGC groups or toxencryptsave.

• https://github.com/oxij/PyTox forked from https://github.com/aitjcize/PyTox by Wei-Ning Huang aitjcize@gmail.com. Hardcore C wrapping which is not easy to keep up to date. No support for NGC or toxencryptsave. Abandonned. This was the basis for the TokTok/py-toxcore-c code until recently.