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swig (was: Re: hdf5-support ?)
From: |
John W. Eaton |
Subject: |
swig (was: Re: hdf5-support ?) |
Date: |
Thu, 18 Aug 2005 12:50:19 -0400 |
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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