GRCon20 - Removing SWIG from GNU Radio

Presented by Joshua Morman and Martin Braun at GNU Radio Conference 2020 https://gnuradio.org/grcon20 GNU Radio has long relied on SWIG to provide bindings from C++ to Python. While as a tool SWIG has served a great purpose, it certainly has its downsides including memory utilization and compile time. For release 3.9, we have gone through the process of converting the binding framework inside GNU Radio and OOTs to utilize pybind11, a more lightweight and modern library for creating python bindings. In this talk, we will present the motivation, benefits, and ramifications of this major change in the GR framework as well as lessons learned and areas for further improvement. Implementation details as well as the differences in workflow for creating OOT blocks will be presented in detail.