[Swig-devel] Fw: Special Qt mode for SWIG

[Dimitar D. <dpl...@ya...>]

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Dimitar Dobrev <dpl...@ya...>
To: William S Fulton <ws...@fu...> 
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 9:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Swig-devel] Special Qt mode for SWIG
 


From: William S Fulton <ws...@fu...>

To: Dimitar Dobrev <dpl...@ya...> 
Cc: "swi...@li..." <swi...@li...> 
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 8:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Swig-devel] Special Qt mode for SWIG
 

On 13/05/13 12:46, Dimitar Dobrev
 wrote:
>
>      Hello,
>
> I'm looking into the possibility to wrap Qt with SWIG. I've already read
> it's quite the challenge but I have an idea about which I'd love to hear
> some opinions.
> You probably know about SMOKE
> <http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Smoke>, another tool for
> wrapping C++ using headers. It has a special "qt" mode which allows it
> to properly recognize and parse Qt headers. I was wondering if the same
> option could in theory be added to SWIG? If so, I'd be interested in
> working on it.

I'm not familiar with the QT world, but from what I understand it is an 
extension of C++. In which case, I can't see any major obstacles as to 
why the SWIG parser couldn't be enhanced to add in QT syntax. SWIG has 
always expected ISO C/C++,
 but I don't have a problem if a flag or 
something similar adds in additional support. Where is the QT syntax 
documented? What are the concepts in QT and can they be mapped onto C++ 
concepts? For example, from what I know, QT has some sort of properties, 
which are very similiar to C++ member variables or even SWIG's %extend 
variables or even %attribute.

Please feel free to make a Github fork for your work on this and use 
this list for discussion.

There is plenty of developer docs to read, however, I'd expect you'll 
first tackle the parsing in Source/CParse/parser.y.

I don't know SMOKE, are there any reasons why SWIG might be a better fit?

William


________________________________
 
    I'm not sure if there is a full list of Qt's macros but here are quite a few. All of their concepts can me expressed through C++ and this is what they do internally. They have a tool called moc (Meta-Object Compiler) that is run on their code before any other steps. It produces standard C++ which is then compiled. The problem is that it produces only "real" cpp files, not "real" headers, and, as stated in the documentation, SWIG cannot be relied upon to work properly with C++ source files. So I figure there should be an option for SWIG to be able to parse Qt headers directly.

    SMOKE is poorly maintained (a single developer who hasn't worked on the main branch for almost a year, and hasn't worked on the project at all for more than half a year). I say that as a person who has sent quite a few patches to SMOKE and reported even more bugs none of which were actually fixed and only two or three paid attention to at all. Besides, SMOKE libraries cannot be used directly, they require an additional C++ layer to be manually written specifically for the binding in question (memory management, marshaling, etc.). As far as I can see, SWIG provides much better automation for these issues.

    Anyway, what I was asking is whether SWIG could wrap Qt with reasonable effort. I read some of the mailing list archives and found some discouraging posts. So, can it be done in practice?

    Dimitar