swigwin

SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator)

Version: 3.0.9 (29 May 2016)

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), Scilab, Ocaml, Modula-3, Common Lisp (CLISP, Allegro CL, CFFI, UFFI) and Pike. SWIG can also export its parse tree into XML and Lisp s-expressions.

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 using the release tarball/zip file. The INSTALL file has generic build and installation instructions for Unix users. Users wishing to build and install code from Github should visit http://swig.org/svn.html to obtain the more detailed instructions required for building code obtained from Github - extra steps are required compared to building from the release tarball.

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