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SWIG 1.1 Users Manual

• Copyright
• About this manual
• Alphabetical Topic Index

Preface

• Introduction
• SWIG resources
• About this manual
• Credits
• What's new?
• Bug reports
• SWIG is free

1 Introduction

• What is SWIG?
• Life before SWIG
• Life after SWIG
• The SWIG package
• A SWIG example
• C syntax, but not a C compiler
• Non-intrusive interface building
• Hands off code generation
• Event driven C programming
• Automatic documentation generation
• Summary
• SWIG for Windows and Macintosh

2 Scripting Languages

• The two language view of the world
• How does a scripting language talk to C?
• Building scripting language extensions
• Shared libraries and dynamic loading

3 SWIG Basics

• Running SWIG
• Simple C functions, variables, and constants
• Pointers and complex objects
• Getting down to business
• Structures, unions, and object oriented C programming
• C++ support
• Objective-C
• Conditional compilation
• Code Insertion
• A general interface building strategy

4 Multiple files and the SWIG library

• The %include directive
• The %extern directive
• The %import directive
• Including files on the command line
• The SWIG library
• Library example
• Creating Library Files
• Working with library files
• Static initialization of multiple modules
• More about the SWIG library

5 Documentation System

• Introduction
• How it works
• Choosing a documentation format
• Function usage and argument names
• Titles, sections, and subsections
• Formatting
• Adding Additional Text
• Disabling all documentation
• An Example
• ASCII Documentation
• HTML Documentation
• LaTeX Documentation
• C++ Support
• The Final Word?

6 Pointers, Constraints, and Typemaps

• Introduction
• The SWIG Pointer Library
• Introduction to typemaps
• Managing input and output parameters
• Applying constraints to input values
• Writing new typemaps
• Common typemap methods
• Writing typemap code
• Typemaps for handling arrays
• Typemaps and the SWIG Library
• Implementing constraints with typemaps
• Typemap examples
• How to break everything with a typemap
• Typemaps and the future

7 Exception Handling

• The %except directive
• Handling exceptions in C code
• Exception handling with longjmp()
• Handling C++ exceptions
• Defining different exception handlers
• Using The SWIG exception library
• Debugging and other interesting uses for %except
• More Examples

8 SWIG and Perl5

• Preliminaries
• Building Perl Extensions under Windows 95/NT
• Modules, packages, and classes
• Basic Perl interface
• A simple Perl example
• Accessing arrays and other strange objects
• Implementing methods in Perl
• Shadow classes
• Getting serious
• Wrapping C libraries and other packages
• Building a Perl5 interface to MATLAB
• Handling output values (the easy way)
• Exception handling
• Remapping datatypes with typemaps
• The gory details on shadow classes
• Where to go from here?

9 SWIG and Python

• Preliminaries
• Building Python Extensions under Windows 95/NT
• The low-level Python/C interface
• Python shadow classes
• About the Examples
• Solving a simple heat-equation
• Wrapping a C library
• Putting it all together
• Exception handling
• Remapping C datatypes with typemaps
• Implementing C callback functions in Python
• Other odds and ends
• The gory details of shadow classes

10 SWIG and Tcl

• Preliminaries
• Building Tcl/Tk Extensions under Windows 95/NT
• Basic Tcl Interface
• The object oriented interface
• About the examples
• Binary trees in Tcl
• Building C/C++ data structures with Tk
• Accessing arrays
• Building a simple OpenGL module
• Exception handling
• Typemaps
• Configuration management with SWIG
• Building new kinds of Tcl interfaces (in Tcl)
• Extending the Tcl Netscape Plugin
• Tcl8.0 features

11 Advanced Topics

• Creating multi-module packages
• Dynamic Loading of C++ modules
• Inside the SWIG type-checker

12 Extending SWIG

• Introduction
• Compiling a SWIG extension
• SWIG output
• The Language class (simple version)
• A tour of SWIG datatypes
• Typemaps (from C)
• File management
• Naming Services
• Code Generation Functions
• Writing a Real Language Module
• C++ Processing
• Documentation Processing
• The Future of SWIG