swig (was: Re: hdf5-support ?)

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Aug-2005, Jon H. Davis wrote:

|        I have sometimes wondered about the possibility of using swig to
|  generate extensions for octave. As it is, swig generates interfaces for
|  pretty near every other scripting language on the planet. I have only
|  used it to generate code for embedding python in some of my own C code,
|  but the documentation seems to have information for enhancing swig to
|  support other scripting languages.

Yes, if the interface to a library is large, then it would make a lot
of sense to use a tool to automate the task of generating the
interface code.  The downside I see is that an automatically generated
interface may not be as good as you might get from writing the code by
hand.  For example, a language like Octave can hide a lot of details
that must be exposed in a lagnauge like C or Fortran (pointers, memory
management, leading dimensions for arrays, etc.).

Modifying swig to generate code for Octave could be useful.  There is
also matwrap, but I don't know if that is actively maintained these
days.

jwe



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