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Is it possible to get Code Completion (Intellisense) in VSCode for Python bindings around a C library (Specifically pydrake)

I'm trying to familiarize myself with the pydrake library, which is python bindings around a C++ library called Drake. I installed the library with pip inside a virtualenv and am tinkering with it in VSCode. Unfortunately, I can't get code completion for most symbols, which makes it kind of difficult to know:

  • What symbols are in each (sub)module
  • What args each function takes and returns

My current work flow has been to look through the C++/Python API online, which works but is a little cumbersome.

I tried to edit the settings.json with:

"python.autoComplete.extraPaths": [
  "${workspaceFolder}/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pydrake/",
  "${workspaceFolder}/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pydrake/lib/", 
  "${workspaceFolder}/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pydrake/common/",
  "${workspaceFolder}/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pydrake/manipulation/"
  ...
],
"python.analysis.extraPaths": [
  "${workspaceFolder}/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pydrake/",
  "${workspaceFolder}/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pydrake/lib/", 
  "${workspaceFolder}/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pydrake/common/",
  "${workspaceFolder}/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pydrake/manipulation/"
  ...
]

That was based on comments from https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/issues/7736#issuecomment-537620794, since those folders contain the cpython .so files. That didn't work for me.

Is it possible to get intellisense for this?

Other details in case they matter:

  • Ubuntu 20.04 5.15.0-48-generic
  • VSCode version: 1.71.2 74b1f979648cc44d385a2286793c226e611f59e7
    • Python extension version: v2022.14.0
  • drake version: drake==1.8.0
Solution

  • See https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake/issues/16987. It's a work in progress.

    As of today (2022-Sep-26), the pydrake library does not yet provide *.pyi files for VSCode autocomplete.

    In general you can try to run tools like stubgen to produce the *.pyi files automatically from the native *.so files and then use those for autocomplete, but for pydrake those tools don't understand our templates yet, so the results are not terribly useful.

    In the meantime, a Jupyter-based editor (e.g., Deepnote) does generally autocomplete the native code correctly. It's only VSCode's virus-protection posture of not loading native code for auto-complete that's getting in your way.