Re: Future of g-wrap (and guile wrappers in general).

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

   From: Rob Browning <address@hidden>
   Date: 20 Aug 2001 13:05:03 -0500

   Overall it seems like dropping g-wrap in favor of SWIG, presuming
   that's even an option, would have the advantage of putting effort
   into making Guile's SWIG support stronger, but we might end up (as
   far as wrapping C functions goes) with a less tightly integrated
   solution than we'd have if we stuck with something more
   guile-specific.  With g-wrap we've been able to tailor the wrapping
   of specific types very closely with Guile smobs or native types using
   libguile directly.  I'm not sure that would be as possible with SWIG.

   Thoughts?

i am in favor of going the swig route because it is a more general
solution and there is significant development effort in its favor.  you
are invited to check out the website and mailing list archives to get a
feel for the reality and potential.

historical note: in early 2000 i revived swig's guile support, albeit
somewhat weakly, but luckily soon afterwards, this effort attracted the
attention of Matthias Koeppe, in whose good hands guile support (and
more) for swig now rests.

perhaps a nice way to preserve g-wrap users would be to make it
interoperable w/ swig (or vice-versa) somehow.  however, i'm not
interested in working on this kind of thing, personally.

thi