SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator)
Version: 3.0.1 (27 May 2014)
Tagline: SWIG is a compiler that integrates C and C++ with languages
including Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, PHP, Java, C#, D, Go, Lua,
Octave, R, Scheme (Guile, MzScheme/Racket, CHICKEN), Ocaml,
Modula-3, Common Lisp (CLISP, Allegro CL, CFFI, UFFI) and Pike.
SWIG can also export its parse tree into Lisp s-expressions and
XML.
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.
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://www.dabeaz.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
License
=======
Please see the LICENSE file for details of the SWIG license. For
further insight into the license including the license of SWIG's
output code, please visit
http://www.swig.org/legal.html
Release Notes
=============
Please see the CHANGES.current file for a detailed list of bug fixes and
new features for the current release. The CHANGES file contains bug fixes
and new features for older versions. A summary of changes in each release
can be found in the RELEASENOTES file.
Documentation
=============
The Doc/Manual directory contains the most recent set of updated
documentation for this release. The documentation is available in
three different formats, each of which contains identical content.
These format are, pdf (Doc/Manual/SWIGDocumentation.pdf), single
page html (Doc/Manual/SWIGDocumentation.html) or multiple page html
(other files in Doc/Manual). Please select your chosen format and
copy/install to wherever takes your fancy.
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.
Documentation is also online at http://www.swig.org/doc.html.
Backwards Compatibility
=======================
The developers strive their best to preserve backwards compatibility
between releases, but this is not always possible as the overriding
aim is to provide the best wrapping experience. Where backwards
compatibility is known to be broken, it is clearly marked as an
incompatibility in the CHANGES and CHANGES.current files.
See the documentation for details of the SWIG_VERSION preprocessor
symbol if you have backward compatibility issues and need to use more
than one version of SWIG.
Installation
============
Please read the Doc/Manual/Preface.html#Preface_installation for
full installation instructions for Windows, Unix and Mac OS X.
The INSTALL file has generic build and installation instructions for
Unix users.
Testing
=======
The typical 'make -k check' can be performed on Unix operating systems.
Please read Doc/Manual/Preface.html#Preface_testing for details.
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 also includes Visual C++ project 6 (.dsp) files for
building some of the examples on Windows. Later versions of Visual Studio
will convert these old style project files into a current solution file.
Known Issues
============
There are minor known bugs, details of which are in the bug tracker, see
http://www.swig.org/bugs.html.
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://www.dabeaz.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl.
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 the swig-devel
mailing list, details at http://www.swig.org/mail.html.
-- The SWIG Maintainers
Below are the changes for the current release.
See the CHANGES file for changes in older releases.
See the RELEASENOTES file for a summary of changes in each release.
Version 3.0.1 (27 May 2014)
===========================
2014-05-25: hfalcic
[Python] Python 3 byte string output: use errors="surrogateescape"
if available on the version of Python that's in use. This allows
obtaining the original byte string (and potentially trying a fallback
encoding) if the bytes can't be decoded as UTF-8.
Previously, a UnicodeDecodeError would be raised with no way to treat
the data as bytes or try another codec.
2014-05-18: vkalinin
Bug #175 - Restore %extend to work for unnamed nested structures by using a C
symbol comprising the outer structure name and unnamed variable instance name.
2014-05-15: kwwette
Add #166 - 'make check' now works out of source. This required te examples to build
out of source. The main languages have been tested - C#, Go, Guile, Java, Javascript,
Lua, Octave, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl.
2014-05-01: Oliver Buchtala
Javascript support added, see Javascript chapter in the documentation.
2014-05-01: olly
[PHP] The generated __isset() method now returns true for read-only properties.
2014-04-24: kwwette
[Go] Fix go ./configure parsing of gccgo --version, and
goruntime.swg typo in __GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__ (SF Bug #1298)
2014-04-24: kwwette
Fix {python|perl5|ruby|tcl}/java examples
In Lib/gcj/cni.i, for compatibility with newer gcj versions:
- remove JvAllocObject() which gcj no longer defines, from gcj Changelog:
2004-04-16 Bryce McKinlay <mckinlay@redhat.com>
* gcj/cni.h (JvAllocObject): Remove these obsolete,
undocumented CNI calls.
- change JvCreateJavaVM() argument from void* to JvVMInitArgs*, from gcj Changelog:
2005-02-23 Thomas Fitzsimmons <fitzsim@redhat.com>
PR libgcj/16923
...
(JvCreateJavaVM): Declare vm_args as JvVMInitArgs* rather than void*.
*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***
2014-04-08: wsfulton
SF Bug #1366 - Remove duplicate declarations of strtoimax and strtoumax in inttypes.i
2014-04-08: wsfulton
[Java C#] Enums which have been ignored via %ignore and are subsequently
used are handled slightly differently. Type wrapper classes are now generated
which are effectively a wrapper of an empty enum. Previously in Java uncompilable
code was generated and in C# an int was used.
2014-04-04: wsfulton
Fix regression in 3.0.0 where legal code following an operator<< definition might
give a syntax error. SF Bug #1365.
2014-04-03: olly
[PHP] Fix wrapping director constructors with default parameters
with a ZTS-enabled build of PHP.
2014-04-02: olly
[PHP] Pass the ZTS context we already have to avoid needing to
call TSRMLS_FETCH, which is relatively expensive.
2014-04-02: olly
[PHP] Pass ZTS context through to t_output_helper() so it works
with a ZTS-enabled build of PHP. Reported by Pierre Labastie in
github PR#155.
2014-03-28: wsfulton
[Java C# D Go] Fixes for C enums used in an API and the definition of the enum
has not been parsed. For D, this fixes a segfault in SWIG. The other languages
now produce code that compiles, although the definition of the enum is needed
in order to use the enum properly from the target language.
2014-03-23: v-for-vandal
[Lua] Fix for usage of snprintf in Lua runtime which Visual Studio does not have.
This file contains a brief overview of the changes made in each release.
A detailed description of changes are available in the CHANGES.current
and CHANGES files.
Release Notes
=============
SWIG-3.0.1 summary:
- Javascript module added. This supports JavascriptCore (Safari/Webkit),
v8 (Chromium) and node.js currently.
- A few notable regressions introduced in 3.0.0 have been fixed - in
Lua, nested classes and parsing of operator <<.
- The usual round of bug fixes and minor improvements for:
C#, GCJ, Go, Java, Lua, PHP and Python.
SWIG-3.0.0 summary:
- This is a major new release focusing primarily on C++ improvements.
- C++11 support added. Please see documentation for details of supported
features: http://www.swig.org/Doc3.0/CPlusPlus11.html
- Nested class support added. This has been taken full advantage of in
Java and C#. Other languages can use the nested classes, but require
further work for a more natural integration into the target language.
We urge folk knowledgeable in the other target languages to step
forward and help with this effort.
- Lua: improved metatables and support for %nspace.
- Go 1.3 support added.
- Python import improvements including relative imports.
- Python 3.3 support completed.
- Perl director support added.
- C# .NET 2 support is now the minimum. Generated using statements are
replaced by fully qualified names.
- Bug fixes and improvements to the following languages:
C#, Go, Guile, Java, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Octave, R, Ruby, Tcl
- Various other bug fixes and improvements affecting all languages.
- Note that this release contains some backwards incompatible changes
in some languages.
- Full detailed release notes are in the changes file.
SWIG-2.0.12 summary:
- This is a maintenance release backporting some fixes from the pending
3.0.0 release.
- Octave 3.8 support added.
- C++11 support for new versions of erase/insert in the STL containers.
- Compilation fixes on some systems for the generated Lua, PHP, Python
and R wrappers.
SWIG-2.0.11 summary:
- Minor bug fixes and enhancements mostly in Python, but also
C#, Lua, Ocaml, Octave, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl.
SWIG-2.0.10 summary:
- Ruby 1.9 support is now complete.
- Add support for Guile 2.0 and Guile 1.6 support (GH interface) has
been dropped.
- Various small language neutral improvements and fixes.
- Various bug fixes and minor improvements specific to C#, CFFI, D,
Java, Octave, PHP, Python,
- Minor bug fix in ccache-swig.
- Development has moved to Github with Travis continuous integration
testing - patches using https://github.com/swig/swig are welcome.
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.
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.
SWIG-2.0.6 summary:
- Regression fix for Python STL wrappers on some systems.
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-2.0.4 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 summary:
- A bug fix release including a couple of fixes for regressions in the
2.0 series.
SWIG-2.0.2 summary:
- 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 summary:
- 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.
- 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 summary:
- 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.
SWIG-1.3.40 summary:
- 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.
SWIG-1.3.39 summary:
- Some new small feature enhancements.
- Improved C# std::vector wrappers.
- Bug fixes: mainly Python, but also Perl, MzScheme, CFFI, Allegrocl
and Ruby
SWIG-1.3.38 summary:
- Output directory regression fix and other minor bug fixes
SWIG-1.3.37 summary:
- 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
- Bug fixes/enhancements for Python, PHP, Java, C#, Chicken, Allegro CL,
CFFI, Ruby, Tcl, Perl, R, Lua.
- Other minor generic bug fixes and enhancements
SWIG-1.3.36 summary:
- 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
SWIG-1.3.35 summary:
- Octave language module added
- Bug fixes in Python, Lua, Java, C#, Perl modules
- A few other generic bugs and runtime assertions fixed
SWIG-1.3.34 summary:
- shared_ptr support for Python
- Support for latest R - version 2.6
- Various minor improvements/bug fixes for R, Lua, Python, Java, C#
- A few other generic bug fixes, mainly for templates and using statements
SWIG-1.3.33 summary:
- Fix regression for Perl where C++ wrappers would not compile
- Fix regression parsing macros
SWIG-1.3.32 summary:
- shared_ptr support for Java and C#
- Enhanced STL support for Ruby
- Windows support for R
- Fixed long-standing memory leak in PHP Module
- Numerous fixes and minor enhancements for Allegrocl, C#, cffi, Chicken, Guile,
Java, Lua, Ocaml, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl.
- Improved warning support
SWIG-1.3.31 summary:
- Python modern classes regression fix
SWIG-1.3.30 summary:
- Python-2.5 support
- New language module: R
- Director support added for C#
- Numerous director fixes and improvements
- Improved mingw/msys support
- Better constants support in Guile and chicken modules
- Support for generating PHP5 class wrappers
- Important Java premature garbage collection fix
- Minor improvements/fixes in cffi, php, allegrocl, perl, chicken, lua, ruby,
ocaml, python, java, c# and guile language modules
- Many many other bug fixes
SWIG-1.3.29 summary:
- Numerous important bug fixes
- Few minor new features
- Some performance improvements in generated code for Python
SWIG-1.3.28 summary:
- More powerful renaming (%rename) capability.
- More user friendly warning handling.
- Add finer control for default constructors and destructors. We discourage
the use of the 'nodefault' option, which disables both constructors and
destructors, leading to possible memory leaks. Use instead 'nodefaultctor'
and/or 'nodefaultdtor'.
- Automatic copy constructor wrapper generation via the 'copyctor' option/feature.
- Better handling of Windows extensions and types.
- Better runtime error reporting.
- Add the %catches directive to catch and dispatch exceptions.
- Add the %naturalvar directive for more 'natural' variable wrapping.
- Better default handling of std::string variables using the %naturalvar directive.
- Add the %allowexcept and %exceptionvar directives to handle exceptions when
accessing a variable.
- Add the %delobject directive to mark methods that act like destructors.
- Add the -fastdispatch option to enable smaller and faster overload dispatch
mechanism.
- Template support for %rename, %feature and %typemap improved.
- Add/doc more debug options, such as -dump_module, -debug_typemaps, etc.
- Unified typemap library (UTL) potentially providing core typemaps for all
scripting languages based on the recently evolving Python typemaps.
- New language module: Common Lisp with CFFI.
- Python, Ruby, Perl and Tcl use the new UTL, many old reported and hidden
errors with typemaps are now fixed.
- Initial Java support for languages using the UTL via GCJ, you can now use
Java libraries in your favorite script language using gcj + swig.
- Tcl support for std::wstring.
- PHP4 module update, many error fixes and actively maintained again.
- Allegrocl support for C++, also enhanced C support.
- Ruby support for bang methods.
- Ruby support for user classes as native exceptions.
- Perl improved dispatching in overloaded functions via the new cast and rank
mechanism.
- Perl improved backward compatibility, 5.004 and later tested and working.
- Python improved backward compatibility, 1.5.2 and later tested and working.
- Python can use the same cast/rank mechanism via the -castmode option.
- Python implicit conversion mechanism similar to C++, via the %implicitconv
directive (replaces and improves the implicit.i library).
- Python threading support added.
- Python STL support improved, iterators are supported and STL containers can
use now the native PyObject type.
- Python many performance options and improvements, try the -O option to test
all of them. Python runtime benchmarks show up to 20 times better performance
compared to 1.3.27 and older versions.
- Python support for 'multi-inheritance' on the python side.
- Python simplified proxy classes, now swig doesn't need to generate the
additional 'ClassPtr' classes.
- Python extended support for smart pointers.
- Python better support for static member variables.
- Python backward compatibility improved, many projects that used to work
only with swig-1.3.21 to swig-1.3.24 are working again with swig-1.3.28
- Python test-suite is now 'valgrinded' before release, and swig also
reports memory leaks due to missing destructors.
- Minor bug fixes and improvements to the Lua, Ruby, Java, C#, Python, Guile,
Chicken, Tcl and Perl modules.
SWIG-1.3.27 summary:
- Fix bug in anonymous typedef structures which was leading to strange behaviour
SWIG-1.3.26 summary:
- New language modules: Lua, CLISP and Common Lisp with UFFI.
- Big overhaul to the PHP module.
- Change to the way 'extern' is handled.
- Minor bug fixes specific to C#, Java, Modula3, Ocaml, Allegro CL,
XML, Lisp s-expressions, Tcl, Ruby and Python modules.
- Other minor improvements and bug fixes.
SWIG-1.3.25 summary:
- Improved runtime type system. Speed of module loading improved in
modules with lots of types. SWIG_RUNTIME_VERSION has been increased
from 1 to 2, but the API is exactly the same; only internal changes
were made.
- The languages that use the runtime type system now support external
access to the runtime type system.
- Various improvements with typemaps and template handling.
- Fewer warnings in generated code.
- Improved colour documentation.
- Many C# module improvements (exception handling, prevention of early
garbage collection, C# attributes support added, more flexible type
marshalling/asymmetric types.)
- Minor improvements and bug fixes specific to the C#, Java, TCL, Guile,
Chicken, MzScheme, Perl, Php, Python, Ruby and Ocaml modules).
- Various other bug fixes and memory leak fixes.
SWIG-1.3.24 summary:
- Improved enum handling
- More runtime library options
- More bugs fixes for templates and template default arguments, directors
and other areas.
- Better smart pointer support, including data members, static members
and %extend.
SWIG-1.3.23 summary:
- Improved support for callbacks
- Python docstring support and better error handling
- C++ default argument support for Java and C# added.
- Improved c++ default argument support for the scripting languages plus
option to use original (compact) default arguments.
- %feature and %ignore/%rename bug fixes and mods - they might need default
arguments specified to maintain compatible behaviour when using the new
default arguments wrapping.
- Runtime library changes: Runtime code can now exist in more than one module
and so need not be compiled into just one module
- Further improved support for templates and namespaces
- Overloaded templated function support added
- More powerful default typemaps (mixed default typemaps)
- Some important %extend and director code bug fixes
- Guile now defaults to using SCM API. The old interface can be obtained by
the -gh option.
- Various minor improvements and bug fixes for C#, Chicken, Guile, Java,
MzScheme, Perl, Python and Ruby
- Improved dependencies generation for constructing Makefiles.
SWIG-1.3.22 summary:
- Improved exception handling and translation of C errors or C++
exceptions into target language exceptions.
- Improved enum support, mapping to built-in Java 1.5 enums and C#
enums or the typesafe enum pattern for these two languages.
- Python - much better STL suppport and support for std::wstring,
wchar_t and FILE *.
- Initial support for Modula3 and Allegro CL.
- 64 bit TCL support.
- Java and C#'s proxy classes are now nearly 100% generated from
typemaps and/or features for finer control on the generated code.
- SWIG runtime library support deprecation.
- Improved documentation. SWIG now additionally provides documentation
in the form of a single HTML page as well as a pdf document.
- Enhanced C++ friend declaration support.
- Better support for reference counted classes.
- Various %fragment improvements.
- RPM fixes.
- Various minor improvements and bug fixes for C#, Chicken, Guile, Java,
MzScheme, Perl, Php, Python, Ruby and XML.
