Skip to content

docs: clarify to what extent bindings are actually global #5859

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Oct 11, 2025
Merged

docs: clarify to what extent bindings are actually global #5859

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
11 changes: 8 additions & 3 deletions docs/advanced/classes.rst
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -972,9 +972,14 @@ Module-local class bindings
===========================

When creating a binding for a class, pybind11 by default makes that binding
"global" across modules. What this means is that a type defined in one module
can be returned from any module resulting in the same Python type. For
example, this allows the following:
"global" across modules. What this means is that instances whose type is
defined with a ``py::class_`` statement in one module can be passed to or
returned from a function defined in any other module that is "ABI compatible"
with the first, i.e., that was built with sufficiently similar versions of
pybind11 and of the C++ compiler and C++ standard library. The internal data
structures that pybind11 uses to keep track of its types and instances are
shared just as they would be if everything were in the same module.
For example, this allows the following:

.. code-block:: cpp

Expand Down
Loading