There are plenty of existing libraries that excel at very specific tasks. It's generally a very good idea to reuse such libraries in our own codebases, because we can rely on years of experience from other groups of experts. As computer architectures and compilers evolve, so do programming languages. Whereas years ago most scientific software was written in Fortran, nowadays C, C++, and interpreted languages – first and foremost Python – are taking the center stage. It is indeed more and more common to integrate code written in a compiled language with bindings to an interpreted language, since it affords the following benefits:
- End-users can customize and expand the capabilities offered by the code itself to fully suit their needs.
- One is able to combine the expressiveness of a language such as Python with the performance of a compiled language...
