SWIG / News: Recent posts

SWIG-2.0.9 summary:
- Improved typemap matching.
- Ruby 1.9 support is much improved.
- Various bug fixes and minor improvements in C#, CFFI, Go, Java,
Modula3, Octave, Perl, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl and in ccache-swig.

GSoC 2012 was SWIG's third Summer of Code, and this year we
received five slots for projects related to SWIG. Out of five,
four students completed the program successfully with valuable
additions to SWIG.

Dmitry Kabak, mentored by Marko Klopcic, worked on SWIG
internals to parse the source code documentation comments within
the C/C++ header files and use them to document the target
language wrapper classes/functions. Dmitry's efforts
complemented the existing support added in GSoC 2008. In
summary, all previously known bugs have been fixed and the
original source code for comment translation was re-factored to
improve performance and maintainability. Parsing of C/C++ source
code has been improved, so that every declaration/definition can
now be commented. Translation of Doxygen tags to Javadoc and
Python docstrings has been improved and corresponding regression
tests have been implemented. The project mentor, Marko Klopcic
has some great ideas for the future GSoC. The work can be tried
out on the branch gsoc2012-doxygen.... read more

SWIG-2.0.8 summary:
- Fix a couple of regressions introduced in 2.0.5 and 2.0.7.
- Improved using declarations and using directives support.
- Minor fixes/enhancements for C#, Java, Octave, Perl and Python.

SWIG-2.0.7 summary:
- Important regression fixes since 2.0.5 for typemaps in general and
in Python.
- Fixes and enhancements for Go, Java, Octave and PHP.

This release fixes a bug in SWIG-2.0.5, please use SWIG-2.0.6 instead.

SWIG-2.0.6 summary:
- Regression fix for Python STL wrappers on some systems.

Google has announced the list of accepted students for the Google Summer of Code program. SWIG was given 5 slots this year the SWIG developer community has chosen the following projects which will be worked on over the next 4 months:

"SWIG's Scilab 6.0 Backend" - Wolfgang Frisch
"Enhance Objective C support" - Swati Sharma
"Get the C backend in shape and into trunk" - Leif Middelschulte
"New module for Javascript" - Neha Narang
"Source Code Documentation Comments" - Dmitry Kabak... read more

SWIG-2.0.5 summary:
- Official Android support added including documentation and examples.
- Improvements involving templates:
1) Various fixes with templates and typedef types.
2) Some template lookup problems fixed.
3) Templated type fixes to use correct typemaps.
- Autodoc documentation generation improvements.
- Python STL container wrappers improvements including addition of
stepped slicing.
- Approximately 70 fixes and minor enhancements for the following
target languages: AllegroCL, C#, D, Go, Java, Lua, Ocaml, Octave,
Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl, Xml.

SWIG has been accepted on the Google Summer of Code program for the third time. This is an opportunity for budding open source programmers to get paid for coding. If you are a student and interested please take a look at http://codewrapper.com/wiki/index.php?title=SWIG_GSoC_2012_ideas_page and http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2012 for further details. Applications must be in by 6 April 2012.

SWIG-2.0.4 release summary:
- This is mainly a Python oriented release including support for Python
built-in types for superior performance with the new -builtin option.
The -builtin option is especially suitable for performance-critical
libraries and applications that call wrapped methods repeatedly.
See the python-specific chapter of the SWIG manual for more info.
- Python 3.2 support has also been added and various Python bugs have
been fixed.
- Octave 3.4 support has also been added.
- There are also the usual minor generic improvements, as well as bug
fixes and enhancements for D, Guile, Lua, Octave, Perl and Tcl.

SWIG-2.0.3 has been released. This is a bug fix release including a couple of fixes for regressions in the 2.0 series.

SWIG-2.0.2 has been released and includes the following changes:

- Support for the D language has been added.
- Various bug fixes and minor enhancements.
- Bug fixes particular to the Clisp, C#, Go, MzScheme, Ocaml, PHP, R, Ruby target languages.

SWIG-2.0.1 has been released and includes the following changes:

- Support for the Go language has been added.
- New regular expression (regex) encoder for renaming symbols based on the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library - http://pcre.org .
- Numerous fixes in reporting file and line numbers in error and warning messages.
- Various bug fixes and improvements in the C#, Lua, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python language modules.

SWIG-2.0.0 has been released. The following are the main changes:

- License changes, see LICENSE file and http://www.swig.org/legal.html .
- Much better nested class/struct support.
- Much improved template partial specialization and explicit specialization handling.
- Namespace support improved with the 'nspace' feature where namespaces can be automatically translated into Java packages or C# namespaces.
- Improved typemap and symbol table debugging.
- Numerous subtle typemap matching rule changes when using the default (SWIGTYPE) type. These now work much like C++ class template partial specialization matching.
- Other small enhancements for typemaps. Typemap fragments are also now official and documented.
- Warning and error display refinements.
- Wrapping of shared_ptr is improved and documented now.
- Numerous C++ unary scope operator (::) fixes.
- Better support for boolean expressions.
- Various bug fixes and improvements in the Allegrocl, C#, Java, Lua, Octave, PHP, Python, R, Ruby and XML modules.

The Software Freedom Conservancy has just announced that SWIG has been accepted as a member of the Conservancy - http://sfconservancy.org/news/2010/apr/20/swig-joins/ . Being part of the Conservancy and all the good work it does for free and open source software is great news for SWIG. The Conservancy provides many benefits such as a formal legal structure and will help ensure the vitality of SWIG as the Conservancy is able to handle donations to the SWIG project. Please visit our new http://www.swig.org/donate.html donations page.... read more

SWIG is a programmer's tool designed to make it easier to use C and C++ code from other popular programming languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Java, and C#. 2009 was SWIG's second Summer of Code, and this year we mentored five projects related to SWIG. All five students were very active over the summer period and produced some great new features. In no particular order:

Matevz Jekovec has been busy working at the coal face of SWIG to add support for C++0x, the forthcoming C++ standard. Matevz has managed to achieve close to full support for C++0x. The C++0x Wikipaedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x details the numerous planned new C++0x features and Matevž has put together a SWIG C++0x page (http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2009-matevz/Doc/Manual/Cpp0x.html) documenting the new SWIG support for each of these. In summary the enhanced C++ language can now be parsed by SWIG, which in itself is a great step. There is much more than just this though, as most of the information parsed is used to create useful wrappers of C++0x code. The work can be tried out on the C++0x branch http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2009-matevz which should be merged fairly soon into a forthcoming release.... read more

SWIG-1.3.40 has been release. A summary of changes is as follows:

- SWIG now supports directors for PHP.
- PHP support improved in general.
- Octave 3.2 support added.
- Various bug fixes/enhancements for Allegrocl, C#, Java, Octave, Perl, Python, Ruby and Tcl.
- Other generic fixes and minor new features.

The students accepted into the Google Summer of Code have now been announced. SWIG has been allocated five student slots by Google and we have chosen the following five projects/students which will be developed over the next four months:

"Add support for Scilab language" - Baozeng Ding
"C++0x support for Swig" - Matevz Jekovec
"Implement Perl binding for Xapian using SWIG" - Kosei MORIYAMA
"Objective C Wrapper Generator over C++ using SWIG" - Ashish Sharma
"Director support for PHP" - Miklos Vajna ... read more

SWIG-1.3.39 has been release. A summary of changes is shown below.

- Some new small feature enhancements.
- Improved C# std::vector wrappers.
- Bug fixes: mainly Python, but also Perl, MzScheme, CFFI, Allegrocl and Ruby

We are excited to announce that SWIG has been accepted onto the Google Summer of Code program for the second year running. This is a chance for SWIG to be enhanced in any way that you would like it to.

The Summer of Code program is designed to get new people involved in free/open-source software and get paid for it. Either become a student and code up the changes or if you have an interest in a particular feature being implemented, become a mentor and get paid for looking after a student. The ideas page at http://code.google.com/p/swig-gsoc/wiki/ProjectIdeas contains some suggestions for SWIG, but any reasonable suggestions will be considered. Please chat to us on IRC at #swig-gsoc on irc.freenode.net or email us on the mailing lists. See http://socghop.appspot.com/ for further general information.

SWIG-1.3.38 has been released. It contains an output directory regression fix and other minor bug fixes.

SWIG is a software development tool that reads C/C++ header files and generates wrapper code to make C/C++ code accessible from other languages including Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, PHP, Java, Ocaml, Lua, C#, Modula-3, R, Octave and Scheme & Lisp variants.

Apart from the usual round of bug fixes and minor new features there are a couple of big new features in this release. The main changes are:

- Python 3 support added
- SWIG now ships with a version of ccache that can be used with SWIG. This enables the files generated by SWIG to be cached so that repeated use of SWIG on unchanged input files speeds up builds quite considerably.
- PHP 4 support removed and PHP support improved in general
- Improved C# array support
- Numerous Allegro CL improvements

SWIG is a programmers tool for semi-automating the calls to C or C++ code from almost any other programming language. The idea is to feed C/C++ header files into SWIG and SWIG then generates the 'glue' code so that your C/C++ library can be used from another language such as Python, Java, C#, Ruby, Perl etc. In fact there are implementations for supporting over 20 different of these target languages. The summer of code students have had a productive summer and have extended the number of languages and features supported in SWIG's first Google Summer of Code.... read more

SWIG-1.3.36 has been released. The major changes are listed below.

- Enhancement to directors to wrap all protected members
- Optimisation feature for objects returned by value
- A few bugs fixes in the PHP, Java, Ruby, R, C#, Python, Lua and Perl modules
- Other minor generic bug fixes

2008/04/21 The students accepted into the Google Summer of Code have now been announced. SWIG has managed to get four slots and we have chosen the following four projects/students:

* "SWIG's Python 3.0 Backend" - Haoyu Bai tutored by Richard Boulton
* "C target language backend" - Maciej Drwal tutored by William Fulton
* "Comment 'Translator' for SWIG" - Cheryl Marie Foil tutored by Olly Betts
* "Support for generating COM wrappers" - Jan Jezabek tutored by Ian Appru ... read more

2008/04/07 SWIG-1.3.35 has been released. This release adds Octave to the list of languages modules that SWIG can generate wrappers for. This release also contains a few bug fixes and regression fixes from the previous release.