A functional scripting interface to an object oriented C++ library

Abstract

The object oriented programming paradigm is widely used in science and engineering. Many open and commercial libraries are written in C++ and increasingly provide bindings to Python, which is much easier to learn, but still partly encourages the use of object oriented programming. However, scientific ideas are much more directly and meaningfully expressed in the purely functional programming paradigm. Here, we take a best practice example, CERNs Python binding for its ROOT library, designed to handle the enormous amounts of data generated by the worlds largest particle accelerator, and translate a simple segment of its tutorial into Clojure, a functional language from the Lisp family. The code examples demonstrate how a purely functional language straightforwardly expresses scientific ideas. Subsequently, we develop a compiled Lisp-C++ interoperation layer to access the ROOT library exclusively via functional code. To preserve the expressivity of the Lisp code, the type hints necessary for C++ code generation are stored in a separate file. The interop system presented here is a generic framework that, when provided with a suitable file of type hints, facilitates access to methods of arbitrary C++ libraries and platforms like real-time microcontrollers.