Wrappers for struct types

[electronstudio]

Discussed in #120

^{Originally posted by charles-esterbrook February 14, 2024}
Printing raylib structs gives opaque strings like <cdata 'struct Color' owning 4 bytes> whether using str() or repr().

The type is there, but not the member values. Whether labeled or not, they would be really useful.

Any chance for that?

[electronstudio]

There have also been requests for Vector2 objects with maths methods. We found a way of making a vector2 wrapper that seems to work in place of the real vector2: https://github.com/electronstudio/raylib-python-cffi/blob/master/examples/extra/vector2_extended.py

However I'm currently thinking that the best solution is just not to use Raylib structs. For vectors, use Numpy to store them and do all operations and then just call tolist() on them when you need to pass them to Raylib. For colours, store them as a list or tuple and the conversion will be automatic.

[electronstudio]

Example one works in place of a cdata Vector2 when passed to a raylib function, but it's still not entirely transparent because raylib functions can return real unwrapped Vector2s that the user then needs to remember to wrap. To make it entirely transparent we would need pyray to do the wrapping and unwrapping on every function call.

This will make pyray a little slower.

• Is it worth the trade off? I'm thinking yes, because any user who really cares about speed can fall back to using raylib functions.

• Is there a way we can trial this, both versions coexisting so people can easily compare?

• How do we handle the issue that raylib functions wont accept these objects without unwrapping? Until now raylib and pyray have been fully interoperable. I'm thinking maybe just change raylib docs to show that functions really require a cdata object.