SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator) Version: 1.3.17 (November 22, 2002) $Header$ Tagline: SWIG is a compiler that integrates C and C++ with languages including Perl, Python, Tcl, Guile, Mzscheme, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Ocaml. SWIG reads annotated C/C++ header files and creates wrapper code (glue code) in order to make the corresponding C/C++ libraries available to the listed languages, or to extend C/C++ programs with a scripting language. This distribution represents the latest development release of SWIG, aiming to replace versions 1.1p5 and 1.1-883. The guilty parties working on this are: Dave Beazley (beazley@cs.uchicago.edu) (SWIG core, Python, Tcl, Perl) William Fulton (wsf@fultondesigns.co.uk) (Java, Cygwin) Matthias Köppe (mkoeppe@mail.math.uni-magdeburg.de) (Guile/MzScheme) Jason Stewart (jason@openinformatics.com) (Perl5) Lyle Johnson (lyle@users.sourceforge.net) (Ruby) Richard Palmer (richard@magicality.org) (PHP) Luigi Ballabio (luigi.ballabio@fastwebnet.it) (Macintosh, STL wrapping) Sam Liddicott (saml@liddicott.com) (PHP) Art Yerkes (ayerkes@speakeasy.net) (Ocaml) Thien-Thi Nguyen (ttn@glug.org) (build/test/misc) Major contributors include: Shibukawa Yoshiki (Japanese Translation) Marcelo Matus (Evil C++ testing) Loic Dachary (Perl5) Masaki Fukushima (Ruby) Past contributors include: Clark McGrew, Dustin Mitchell, Ian Cooke, Catalin Dumitrescu, Baran Kovuk, Gary Holt, David Fletcher, Oleg Tolmatcev, Harco de Hilster. (See CHANGES for a more complete list). Up-to-date SWIG related information can be found at http://www.swig.org A SWIG FAQ and other hints can be found on the SWIG Wiki: http://swig.cs.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/wiki.pl Information about SWIG is also available in Japanese translation at http://swig-jp.dyndns.org !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!! IMPORTANT !!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!!!!! Previous SWIG users should read the documentation !!!!!!! !!!!!!! file Doc/Manual/SWIG.html before trying to use SWIG1.3 !!!!!!! !!!!!!! on existing SWIG interfaces. This is the most current !!!!!!! !!!!!!! documentation that describes new 1.3 features and !!!!!!! !!!!!!! incompatibilities. !!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What's New? =========== The most notable changes since SWIG1.1 include the following: - Support for C++ overloaded functions and methods. - Support for C++ smart pointers. - Support for C++ namespaces - Support for C++ overloaded operators. - Support for C++ templates including member templates, specialization, and partial specialization. - Parsing support for almost all C/C++ datatypes. - A full C preprocessor with macro expansion. Includes C99 variadic macro support. - Java, Ruby, MzScheme, PHP4, OCAML, Pike, and XML modules added. Guile module improved. - Better code generation. SWIG is better able to make optimizations in order to generate less code. - Testing framework part of the distribution ("make -k check" support). - A lot of minor bug fixes and cleanup. - Better Windows support. If you used SWIG-1.1, a number of old features are missing from SWIG-1.3. - The SWIG1.1 documentation system is gone and hasn't been replaced yet. This is on the long-term to-do list. - The Tcl7.x and Perl4 modules are deprecated and no longer included. - A wide variety of old SWIG command-line options and obscure features are gone. - A lot of old %pragma directives and obscure undocumented customization features have been eliminated. The same functionality is now available through other means. - Objective C support doesn't work right now. No ETA as to when it will return. Although we are making some attempt to preserve backwards compatibility with interfaces written for SWIG1.1, SWIG1.3 incorporates a number of very substantial modifications to type handling, typemaps, and wrapper code generation. Therefore, if you are making extensive use of advanced SWIG features, interfaces written for SWIG1.1 may not work. We apologize for the inconvenience, but these changes are needed in order to fix a number of annoying "features" in SWIG1.1. Hopefully the list of new features will provide enough incentive for you to upgrade (and that the modifications to your interfaces will only be minor). In addition, SWIG1.3 makes no attempt to be compatible with SWIG1.1 at the C++ API level so language modules written for SWIG1.1 will most definitely not work with this release. The files NEW and CHANGES describe in some detail all of the important changes that have been made to the system. Experienced users would be well advised to read this. Windows Installation ==================== Please see the Doc/Manual/Windows.html file for instructions on installing SWIG on Windows and running the examples. The Windows distribution is called swigwin and includes a prebuilt SWIG executable, swig.exe, included in the same directory as this README file. Otherwise it is exactly the same as the main SWIG distribution. There is no need to download anything else. Unix Installation ================= To build and install SWIG, simply type the following: % ./configure % make % make install By default SWIG installs itself in /usr/local. If you need to install SWIG in a different location or in your home directory, use the --prefix option to ./configure. For example: % ./configure --prefix=/home/yourname/projects % make % make install Note: the directory given to --prefix must be an absolute pathname. Do *NOT* use the ~ shell-escape to refer to your home directory. SWIG won't work properly if you do this. The file INSTALL details more about using configure. Also try % ./configure --help. The configure script will attempt to locate various packages on your machine, including Tcl, Perl5, Python and other target languages that SWIG uses. Don't panic if you get 'not found' messages--SWIG does not need these packages to compile or run. The configure script is actually looking for these packages so that you can try out the SWIG examples contained in the 'Examples' directory without having to hack Makefiles. Notes: (1) If you checked the code out via CVS, you will have to run ./autogen.sh before typing 'configure'. In addition, a full build of SWIG requires the use of bison. Testing ======= If you want to test SWIG before installation, type the following: % make -k check 'make -k check' requires at least one of the target languages to be installed. If it fails, it may mean that you have an uninstalled language module or that the file 'Examples/Makefile' has been incorrectly configured. It may also fail due to compiler issues such as broken C++ compiler. Even if 'make -k check' fails, there is a pretty good chance SWIG still works correctly---you will just have to mess around with one of the examples and some makefiles to get it to work. The testing suite executed by 'make -k check' is designed to stress-test many parts of the implementation including obscure corner cases. If some of these tests fail or generate warning messages, there is no reason for alarm---the test may be related to some new SWIG feature or a difficult bug that we're trying to resolve. Chances are that SWIG will work just fine for you. Note: SWIG's support for C++ is sufficiently advanced that certain tests may fail on older C++ compilers (for instance if your compiler does not support member templates). These errors are harmless if you don't intend to use these features in your own programs. Note: The test-suite currently contains more than 170 tests. If you have many different target languages installed and a slow machine, it might take more than an hour to run the test-suite. Examples ======== The Examples directory contains a variety of examples of using SWIG and it has some browsable documentation. Simply point your browser to the file "Example/index.html". The Examples directory now includes Visual C++ project (.dsp) files for building some of the examples on Windows (new in SWIG1.3.7). Known Issues ============ The SWIG-1.3.15 release includes a number of substantial changes to existing language modules. These changes include modifications to the build environment and the wrapper code itself. Certain examples may not compile or may need minor changes to work. Please see the CHANGES file for a detailed list of changes. Troubleshooting =============== In order to operate correctly, SWIG relies upon a set of library files. If after building SWIG, you get error messages like this, % swig foo.i :1. Unable to find 'swig.swg' :3. Unable to find 'tcl8.swg' it means that SWIG has either been incorrectly configured or installed. To fix this: 1. Make sure you remembered to do a 'make install' and that the installation actually worked. Make sure you have write permission on the install directory. 2. If that doesn't work, type 'swig -swiglib' to find out where SWIG thinks its library is located. 3. If the location is not where you expect, perhaps you supplied a bad option to configure. Use ./configure --prefix=pathname to set the SWIG install location. Also, make sure you don't include a shell escape character such as ~ when you specify the path. 4. The SWIG library can be changed by setting the SWIG_LIB environment variable. However, you really shouldn't have to do this. If you are having other troubles, you might look at the SWIG Wiki at http://swig.cs.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/wiki.pl. Documentation ============= The Doc/Manual directory contains the most recent set of updated documentation for this release. As this is a development release, the documentation is not entirely up to date and is being worked on. We are working on it, but there is a lot of old documentation and it is going to take time to complete. Please be patient or volunteer to help. !! The most up-to-date information concerning new features in SWIG1.3 is the !! file Doc/Manual/SWIG.html. There is some technical developer documentation available in the Doc/Devel subdirectory. This is not necessarily up-to-date, but it has some information on SWIG internals. Participate! ============ Please report any errors and submit patches (if possible)! We only have access to a limited variety of hardware (Linux, Solaris, OS-X, and Windows). All contributions help. If you would like to join the SWIG development team or contribute a language module to the distribution, please contact swig-dev@cs.uchicago.edu. -- The SWIG Maintainers