pybind/pybind11

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

18008 stars · 2320 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

pybind11 is a lightweight header-only C++11 library that exposes C++ types and functions in Python (and vice versa), primarily for creating Python bindings of existing C++ code. It uses compile-time introspection to minimize boilerplate, serving as a compact, self-contained alternative to Boost.Python.

Use cases

• create python bindings for a c++ library
• call c++ code from python
• expose c++ classes and functions as a python extension module
• embed the python interpreter in a c++ application
• wrap c++ stl containers and smart pointers for python
• speed up python hot paths with compiled c++ extensions

When to choose

• you want modern C++11 bindings with minimal boilerplate
• you want a lightweight alternative to Boost.Python without the Boost dependency
• you need to bind classes, overloaded functions, exceptions, STL containers, or smart pointers
• you need CPython, PyPy, or GraalPy support with CMake/Setuptools/scikit-build integration

When to avoid

• your codebase must support pre-C++11 compilers
• you need bindings for languages other than Python
• you prefer a runtime-based binding approach like ctypes or cffi without compilation

Facets

library · maturity stable

sdk developer-tools compiler developer-tools programming-languages cross-platform python cpp cross-platform windows python-bindings c++11 header-only extension-modules boost-python-alternative cpython pypy numpy cmake linux macos

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