Re: [guppi-list] New Guppi Snapshot

[Rob Browning <rlb cs utexas edu>]

Andrew Chatham <andrew.chatham@duke.edu> writes:

> I don't really know anything about Guile other than what I've learned turning
> the guile bindings for guppi into Python bindings (I adjusted James
> Henstridge's wrapper generators for PyGTK), but what are the problems with
> SWIG? 
> 
> Was it the problem of dealing with complex datatypes and arrays? You
> didn't like the interface files? It sounds like what you're describing is
> another version of SWIG, which I'm sure it's not, but I'm curious what the
> problems were and the differences are.

The main problem was that when I came along a year or two ago and
needed a guile tool for this job, I tried contacting the swig
developers to see if they were interested in work on the guile
backend.  No one responded, and from poking around the lists, it
didn't look like there was much interest in real support for guile.
Christopher Lee (of g-wrap), on the other hand, was very responsive
and I was able to move forward quite easily.  That's about it.

g-wrap also has some other features that you might consider advantages
that make me prefer it at least for wrapping libs for guile.

  1) it's small, and though not that easy to understand ATM, could be
     reworked to be very clear without much hassle.

  2) it doesn't fall down the rathole of trying to parse C code.  The
     API spec file is separate, and fairly clean (though it could be
     cleaner), and ideally, it should eventually capture all the
     relevant information about the C API, including a lot of things
     you can't tell from just scanning prototypes.

  3) Since the API spec is just scheme forms, writing tools to parse
     it and do whatever you want is a *lot* easier than trying to
     parse the ad-hoc curly-brace syntax of C and SWIG, and as a
     personal matter, swig has just seemed to have a little too much
     of the perl "whatever works" feel to it.  (Don't get me wrong.
     Perl's a useful language - too useful to ignore in fact - but
     it's no asthetic marvel.)

IMO, YMMV, and all that...

One of the things we're about to add is support for glib <-> guile
data types, including lists, vectors, maybe hashes, etc.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930