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- <a name="n1"></a><H1>0 Preface</H1>
- <!-- INDEX -->
- <ul>
- <li><a href="#n2">Introduction</a>
- <li><a href="#n3">Special Introduction for Version 1.3</a>
- <li><a href="#n4">SWIG Versions</a>
- <li><a href="#n5">SWIG resources</a>
- <li><a href="#n6">Prerequisites</a>
- <li><a href="#n7">Organization of this manual</a>
- <li><a href="#n8">How to avoid reading the manual</a>
- <li><a href="#n9">Backwards Compatibility</a>
- <li><a href="#n10">Credits</a>
- <li><a href="#n11">Bug reports</a>
- </ul>
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- <a name="n2"></a><H2>0.1 Introduction</H2>
- SWIG is a software development tool for building scripting language
- interfaces to C and C++ programs. Originally developed in 1995, SWIG was
- first used by scientists in the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory for
- building user interfaces to simulation codes running on the Connection
- Machine 5 supercomputer. In this environment, scientists needed to
- work with huge amounts of simulation data, complex hardware, and a
- constantly changing code base. The use of a scripting language
- interface provided a simple yet highly flexible foundation for solving these
- types of problems. SWIG simplifies development by largely automating
- the task of scripting language integration--allowing developers and users
- to focus on more important problems.
- <p>
- Although SWIG was originally developed for scientific applications, it
- has since evolved into a general purpose tool that is used in a wide
- variety of applications--in fact almost anything where C/C++ programming
- is involved.
- <p>
- <a name="n3"></a><H2>0.2 Special Introduction for Version 1.3</H2>
- Since SWIG was released in 1996, its user base and applicability has
- continued to grow. Although its rate of development has varied, an
- active development effort has continued to make improvements to the
- system. Today, nearly a dozen developers are working to create
- SWIG-2.0---a system that aims to provide wrapping support for nearly
- all of the ANSI C++ standard and approximately ten target languages
- including Guile, Java, Mzscheme, Ocaml, Perl, Pike, PHP, Python, Ruby,
- and Tcl.
- <p>
- <a name="n4"></a><H2>0.3 SWIG Versions</H2>
- For several years, the most stable version of SWIG has been release
- 1.1p5. Starting with version 1.3, a new version numbering scheme has
- been adopted. Odd version numbers (1.3, 1.5, etc.) represent
- development versions of SWIG. Even version numbers (1.4, 1.6, etc.)
- represent stable releases. Currently, developers are working to
- create a stable SWIG-2.0 release (late 2002).
- <a name="n5"></a><H2>0.4 SWIG resources</H2>
- The official location of SWIG related material is<p>
- <blockquote><pre>
- <a href="http://www.swig.org">http://www.swig.org</a>
- </pre></blockquote>
- <p>
- This site contains the latest version of the software, users guide,
- and information regarding bugs, installation problems, and
- implementation tricks.
- <p>
- You can also subscribe to the SWIG mailing list by visiting the page
- <p>
- <blockquote><pre><a href="http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/listinfo/swig">http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/listinfo/swig</a>
- </pre></blockquote>
- <p>
- The mailing list often discusses some of the more technical aspects of
- SWIG along with information about beta releases and future work.<p>
- <p>
- CVS access to the latest version of SWIG is also available. More information
- about this can be obtained at:
- <p>
- <blockquote><pre><a href="http://www.swig.org/cvs.html">http://www.swig.org/cvs.html</a>
- </pre></blockquote>
- <a name="n6"></a><H2>0.5 Prerequisites</H2>
- This manual assumes that you know how to write C/C++ programs and that you
- have at least heard of scripting languages such as
- Tcl, Python, and Perl. A detailed knowledge of these scripting
- languages is not required although some familiarity won't
- hurt. No prior experience with building C extensions to these
- languages is required---after all, this is what SWIG does automatically.
- However, you should be reasonably familiar with the use of
- compilers, linkers, and makefiles since making
- scripting language extensions is somewhat more complicated than
- writing a normal C program.
- <a name="n7"></a><H2>0.6 Organization of this manual</H2>
- The first few chapters of this manual describe SWIG in general and
- provide an overview of its capabilities. The remaining chapters are
- devoted to specific SWIG language modules and are self
- contained. Thus, if you are using SWIG to build Python interfaces, you
- can probably skip to that chapter and find almost everything you need
- to know. Caveat: we are currently working on a documentation rewrite and many
- of the older language module chapters are still somewhat out of date.
- <a name="n8"></a><H2>0.7 How to avoid reading the manual</H2>
- If you hate reading manuals, glance at the "Introduction" which
- contains a few simple examples. These
- examples contain about 95% of everything you need to know to use
- SWIG. After that, simply use the language-specific chapters as a reference.
- The SWIG distribution also comes with a large directory of
- examples that illustrate different topics.
- <a name="n9"></a><H2>0.8 Backwards Compatibility</H2>
- If you are a previous user of SWIG, don't expect recent versions of
- SWIG to provide backwards compatibility. In fact, backwards
- compatibility issues may arise even between successive 1.3.x releases.
- Although these incompatibilities are regretable, SWIG-1.3 is an active
- development project. The primary goal of this effort is to make SWIG
- better---a process that would simply be impossible if the developers
- are constantly bogged down with backwards compatibility issues.
- <p>
- On a positive note, a few incompatibilities are a small price to pay
- for the large number of new features that have been
- added---namespaces, templates, smart pointers, overloaded methods,
- operators, and more.
- <a name="n10"></a><H2>0.9 Credits</H2>
- SWIG is an unfunded project that would not be possible without the
- contributions of many people. Most recent SWIG development has been
- supported by Matthias Köppe, William Fulton, Lyle Johnson,
- Richard Palmer, Thien-Thi Nguyen, Jason Stewart, Loic Dachary, Masaki
- Fukushima, Luigi Ballabio, Sam Liddicott, Art Yerkes, Marcelo Matus, and Harco de Hilster.
- <p>
- Historically, the following people contributed to early versions of SWIG.
- Peter Lomdahl, Brad Holian, Shujia Zhou, Niels Jensen, and Tim Germann
- at Los Alamos National Laboratory were the first users. Patrick
- Tullmann at the University of Utah suggested the idea of automatic
- documentation generation. John Schmidt and Kurtis Bleeker at the
- University of Utah tested out the early versions. Chris Johnson
- supported SWIG's developed at the University of Utah. John Buckman,
- Larry Virden, and Tom Schwaller provided valuable input on the first
- releases and improving the portability of SWIG. David Fletcher and
- Gary Holt have provided a great deal of input on improving SWIG's
- Perl5 implementation. Kevin Butler contributed the first Windows NT
- port.
- <a name="n11"></a><H2>0.10 Bug reports</H2>
- Although every attempt has been made to make SWIG bug-free, we are also trying
- to make feature improvements that may introduce bugs.
- To report a bug, either send mail to the SWIG developer
- list at <tt>swig-dev@cs.uchicago.edu</tt> or report a bug
- at <tt>http://www.swig.org</tt>. In your report, be as specific as
- possible, including (if applicable), error messages, tracebacks (if a
- core dump occurred), corresponding portions of the SWIG interface file
- used, and any important pieces of the SWIG generated wrapper code. We
- can only fix bugs if we know about them.
- <p><hr>
- <address>SWIG 1.3 - Last Modified : August 10, 2002</address>
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