Given the slow pace of development on PyCXX, I know it has been the desire of some here to remove our dependency on it. I thought a helpful starting point to evaluate the alternatives would be to restructure one of our extensions to not use PyCXX anymore. I've taken the PNG extension, which is reasonably straightforward in that it doesn't define any custom types, but does have some low level C-wrapping challenges, and separated out the Python-specific parts from the libpng-specific parts. The Python-specific parts are now written using the "raw" Python C/API. The other part still uses C++ (not C) and does throw exceptions, but doesn't use classes or templates or anything else that can be difficult to wrap. All of this is on my "no_cxx" branch. Now here's the challenge: can we do better than this using any of the available wrapping tools? Cython, SWIG, Boost.Python etc.? I've not had much luck with Cython for this kind of thing in the past, but I know it is popular. Perhaps someone with more Cython experience would want to take a crack at this and then we could have something concrete to compare... Cheers, Mike