Binding Generation: What Is Shiboken?

When you install PySide6 you might have notice that also Shiboken6 is installed as a dependency:

$ pip install pyside6
Collecting pyside6
  Downloading PySide6-6.0.0-6.0.0-cp36.cp37.cp38.cp39-abi3-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (170.5 MB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 170.5 MB 42 kB/s
Collecting shiboken6==6.0.0
  Downloading shiboken6-6.0.0-6.0.0-cp36.cp37.cp38.cp39-abi3-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (964 kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 964 kB 29.3 MB/s
Installing collected packages: shiboken6, pyside6
Successfully installed pyside6-6.0.0 shiboken6-6.0.0

That installed package is also called Shiboken Module, and it contains some utilities for PySide to properly work. You can find more information about it on its documentation page (module)

There is a third package that does not get installed when you install PySide, because it is not required, and it is called Shiboken Generator.

Most of the times you see mentions to use “Shiboken” or to do something related to “binding generation”, it is about this third package, and not the dependency of the PySide package.

Do I Need Shiboken Generator?

If your goal is to just write Qt applications in Python, you do not need to worry about a Shiboken generator installation, but on the other hand, if you want to work with your own bindings or extend Qt/C++ applications with Python, you need it.

You can find all the information related to Shiboken on its documentation page (generator).