[Chicken-users] Re: Future of SWIG chicken module

[Jonah Beckford]

Hi, this is Jonah Beckford responding to this email. 
I have been absent for the better part of a year due
to some issues raised by my employer and my open
source activities.  I am close to getting the issues
resolved, and should have the green light in the next
day or two.  I am terribly sorry for the mess this has
caused.  While I can't comment on the substance of the
issues, I can say that they weren't related to my work
with Chicken or SWIG (other than the activities I was
allowed to dedicate my time to).  Lovely stuff ... I
have not seen a response to this email yet, and I will
be replying to this thread in the next couple of days.

Thanks.

Jonah Beckford

--- John Lenz <address@hidden> wrote:
> I am sending this email to raise the issue of the
> status and future of  
> the SWIG chicken module.
> 
> Useful links
> http://www.swig.org
>
http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/chicken.html
> 
> The current chicken SWIG module is useable but
> broken (it has a major  
> bug with the runtime code). The original submitter
> and maintainer of  
> the SWIG chicken module, Jonah Beckford, seems to
> have dissappeared and  
> currently I believe the SWIG chicken module is
> unmaintained.
> 
> The major problem with the chicken SWIG module is
> the incorrect usage  
> of the swig runtime code, see the SWIG bug #782468
>
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=782468&group_id=1645&atid=101645
> 
> I do not know a lot about chicken internals, but it
> seems to me that  
> chicken now has some automatic C++ wrapping
> implemented.  Since the  
> maintainer of the SWIG chicken module is not around
> anymore and the  
> SWIG chicken module has some serious bugs in it, my
> question is
> 
> Is it worth fixing and maintaing the SWIG chicken
> module?
> 
> SWIG has advantages over the C++ parser and wrapper
> in chicken
> - Almost complete C/C++ parser. (SWIG can take and
> wrap pretty much any  
> header file)
> - Operator overloading
> - Exceptions
> - Member variables
> - template support? (SWIG has template support...
> does chicken?)
> - variable argument functions (SWIG supports these,
> does chicken?)
> - customized type conversion (typemaps)
> 
> SWIG features that chicken does not use but features
> which the SWIG  
> chicken module could be expanded to use.
> - directors
> - c++ typemaps (std::vector<>, std::map<>, etc...)
> 
> In my opinion, chicken seems to be growing to
> include many of the  
> features of SWIG and duplicate effort should be
> eliminated.  I think  
> effort should be focused on using and developing
> either SWIG or the  
> chicken parser and wrapper, but not both.
> 
> 1) Plan on using the current chicken c/c++ parser
> and wrapper and just  
> get rid of the SWIG chicken module.  With this
> route, SWIG and chicken  
> would part ways and the chicken c/c++ parser and
> wrapper could be  
> expaneded to include the features that were needed
> (if any).  The SWIG  
> chicken module would then be depreciated and
> unmaintained, and if any  
> changes to SWIG in the future cause the chicken
> module to break  
> completly, the chicken module would then just be
> removed.  The decision  
> then would be up to David Beazley, the SWIG
> maintainer, when to remove  
> the module (maybe just remove the chicken module
> now).
> 
> 2) Maintain the SWIG chicken module.
> I would be willing to maintain the SWIG chicken
> module if there is  
> enough interest in it.  If we go this route, a lot
> of technical  
> decisions need to be made about how the module will
> work.  The c++  
> parser and wrapper in chicken could be removed and
> chicken could call  
> SWIG to parse c and c++ stuff.  This would be an
> interesting approach,  
> because then using SWIG would be completly
> transparent.  Chicken would  
> pass to SWIG the C or C++ definitions and SWIG would
> then return the  
> scheme definitions.  For example, SWIG would be
> given the C string "int  
> add(int a, int b)" and would return say "(define add
> (foreign-lambda  
> int "add" int int))" which would then be further
> processed by chicken.   
> With this approach, chichen would almost immediatly
> get all the  
> features of SWIG!
> 
> Again the decision that should be made now is that
> since chicken and  
> SWIG overlap in a lot of what they do, does SWIG
> bring enough new  
> features and does SWIG provide a useful tool for
> writing chicken code?   
> Is there enough interest and is it worth the effort
> to update and  
> maintain the SWIG chicken module?
> 
> And then if it is worth maintaining the SWIG chicken
> module, there are  
> a bunch of technical decisions to be made on exactly
> how SWIG and  
> chicken will interact, which I will discuss in more
> detail if we choose  
> this option.
> 
> John


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