Obviously, Hugh is some kind of mad scientist.
The thing that scares me about this is that, every 3d engine I’ve started messing around with that has python bindings…sooner or later they start changing it to swig, or boost, or whatever, for whatever reasons…and it ends up being dropped and has to be picked up by someone else. Who promptly decides to do it using a different method! Of course, that’s not too likely here, since Python is decidely tied to Panda3d as the primary language supported and documented.
I think that if you guys change the way it works, you should consider as a primary concern wether it will make it easier for developers to contribute new C++ code to Panda3d. The users only using Python are not going to be affected, by and large. So it should be most important that the method used is the one that makes extending Panda3d easy, and accessible to the most coders.
Would using SWIG make it easier (or harder) for someone to create bindings for other languages such as java or ruby?