[Adonthell-devel] SWIG 1.3.24 and more ...

[Kai Sterker]

It's done :-).

I have managed to get the v0.4 code working with latest SWIG. There  
have been a few changes, but nothing too dramatic. I have replaced  
the swig_runtime library with a lib called py_runtime which contains  
a few wrappers around the internal SWIG functions we used to call.  
Specifically, there is py_to_cxx (for passing Python objects to C++)  
and cxx_to_py for the other way round. As they are implemented in a  
SWIG interface file, they have access to all the static SWIG functions.

Where we formerly called SWIG internals directly in our code, one of  
the functions above is used now. That's it; our different Python  
modules are linked against py_runtime as they were against  
swig_runtime, ensuring that wrapped classes are seen by all modules.

As I had some troubles with this at first, I have also started work  
on a separate debug module. For now, it's only function  
'log_py_objects()' prints all types known to SWIG. Others will  
follow. For example, since I ran into problems with it, I plan a  
function to list information about the python object pool used by  
game events (and others). There might be other parts of the engine  
where debug information might be useful to track down problems. All  
such functionality could be grouped in the debug module. That way, it  
will not clutter other modules with stuff that is not really  
required. But if developers/game designers face problems, they can  
pop up the Python Console, import debug and have a look at engine  
internals that are hardly available otherwise.

Now that I am at home again and have access to the net, I'll continue  
with the documentation, but more code to come for sure ...

Kai

P.S. When you update your code, make sure to remove all *_wrap.cc  
files from py-wrappers/adonthell, so that SWIG can generate them new.  
Mixing code from old SWIG versions with the new 1.3.24 won't work!