[Chicken-users] [Proposal] Officially drop SWIG support?

[Peter Bex]

Hello everyone,

I was browsing our code a bit and noticed that we have a special
"swig pointer" type.  However, there seems no way to construct
it from Scheme and as far as I remember, SWIG support has bitrotted
to the point of being useless.  This is also mentioned in the
manual at http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/4/Unit%20lolevel#foreign-pointers
Besides, I don't really understand why SWIG needs a special pointer
type for it.

If you look at the documentation at the SWIG site itself, it is full
of pre-CHICKEN 4 anachonisms; it still mentions only "units", no
modules, it refers to TinyCLOS as the go-to library for OOP, it mentions
a program called "chicken-config" which has been removed before we
even migrated CHICKEN to the subversion repository. Behold:
http://swig.org/Doc3.0/Chicken.html

Since nobody is really maintaining SWIG support in CHICKEN, it may be
better to just drop compatibility altogether rather than keep lugging
this undead legacy stuff around.  Removing some of this may also make
some pointer operations faster as we don't need to check for the SWIG
pointer type.  This is probably a very minimal improvement, though.

So what do you all think?  Should we drop SWIG support for CHICKEN 5?
Is anyone still using SWIG?

Cheers,
Peter

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