SWIG News

Add experimental support for C as a target language.
MzScheme/Racket is deprecated and planned for removal in SWIG-4.4.
The distributed Windows binary is now a 64-bit executable.
Add some missing use of move semantics for performance improvements.
Enhanced handling of namespaces when using the nspace feature.
STL wrapper enhancements for std::unique_ptr, std::string_view,
std::filesystem.
Various enum and enum class wrapping improvements.
Other C++ handling improvements around templates, friends, C++11
trailing return types and C++17 fold expressions.
Many parser improvements for both C and C++, especially expressions.
Improvements to handling of string and character literals.
Minor preprocessor fixes.
Python: Stricter stable ABI conformance, add support for python-3.13.
C#: Add support for converting Doxygen comments into XML C# comments.
Various other target language specific enhancements and updates for
Java, Javascript, Lua, MzScheme, Ocaml, Octave, Perl, Python, R, Ruby.

2024/02/24 - SWIG-4.2.1 released

SWIG-4.2.1 is primarily a stability and regression fix release, but also includes:

Tcl 9.0 support.
Octave 9.0 support.
Improvements wrapping friend functions.
Variadic templated functions within a template support.
Type deduction enhancements.

2023/12/31 - SWIG-4.2.0 released

SWIG-4.2.0 summary:

Various template wrapping improvements: template template parameters,
variadic templates, partially specialized templates, const template
parameters and improved error checking instantiating templates.
Improved decltype() support for expressions.
C++14 auto without trailing return type and C++11 auto variables.
Numerous C++ using declarations improvements.
Numerous fixes for constructors, destructors and assignment operators:
implicit, default and deleted and related non-assignable variable
wrappers.
STL: std::array and std::map improvements, std::string_view support
added.
Various C preprocessor improvements.
Various issues fixed to do with architecture specific long type.
Various Doxygen improvements.
D1/Tango support removed. D2/Phobos is now the supported D version
and SWIG now generates code which works with recent D2 releases.
New Javascript generator targeting Node.js binary stable ABI Node-API.
Octave 8.1 support added.
PHP7 support removed, PHP8 is now the supported PHP version.
Python STL container wrappers now use the Python Iterator Protocol.
Python stable ABI support added.
Python 3.12 support added.
Ruby 3.2 and 3.3 support.
Scilab 2023.* support added.
Various minor enhancements for C#, Go, Guile, Javascript, Lua, Ocaml,
Perl, PHP, R, Racket, Ruby, Scilab and Tcl.
A number of deprecated features have been removed.

2022/11/30 - SWIG-4.1.1 released

SWIG-4.1.1 summary:

Couple of stability fixes.
Stability fix in ccache-swig when calculating hashes of inputs.
Some template handling improvements.
R - minor fixes plus deprecation for rtypecheck typemaps being optional.

2022/10/24 - SWIG-4.1.0 released

SWIG-4.1.0 summary:

Add Javascript Node v12-v18 support, remove support prior to v6.
Octave 6.0 to 6.4 support added.
Add PHP 8 support.
PHP wrapping is now done entirely via PHP's C API - no more .php wrapper.
Perl 5.8.0 is now the oldest version SWIG supports.
Python 3.3 is now the oldest Python 3 version SWIG supports.
Python 3.9-3.11 support added.
Various memory leak fixes in Python generated code.
Scilab 5.5-6.1 support improved.
Many improvements for each and every target language.
Various preprocessor expression handling improvements.
Improved C99, C++11, C++14, C++17 support. Start adding C++20 standard.
Make SWIG much more move semantics friendly.
Add C++ std::unique_ptr support.
Few minor C++ template handling improvements.
Various C++ using declaration fixes.
Few fixes for handling Doxygen comments.
GitHub Actions is now used instead of Travis CI for continuous integration.
Add building SWIG using CMake as a secondary build system.
Update optional SWIG build dependency for regex support from PCRE to PCRE2.

2020/06/08 - SWIG-4.0.2 released

SWIG-4.0.2 summary:

A few fixes around doxygen comment handling.
Ruby 2.7 support added.
Various minor improvements to C#, D, Java, OCaml, Octave, Python, R, Ruby.
Considerable performance improvement running SWIG on large interface files.

2019/08/21 - SWIG-4.0.1 released

SWIG-4.0.1 summary:

SWIG now cleans up on error by removing all generated files.
Add Python 3.8 support.
Python Sphinx compatibility added for Doxygen comments.
Some minor regressions introduced in 4.0.0 were fixed.
Fix some C++17 compatibility problems in Python and Ruby generated code.
Minor improvements/fixes for C#, Java, Javascript, Lua, MzScheme, Ocaml, Octave and Python.

2019/04/28 - SWIG-4.0.0 released

SWIG-4.0.0 summary

Support for Doxygen documentation comments which are parsed and converted into JavaDoc or PyDoc comments.
STL wrappers improved for C#, Java and Ruby.
C++11 STL containers added for Java, Python and Ruby.
Improved support for parsing C++11 and C++14 code.
Various fixes for shared_ptr.
Various C preprocessor corner case fixes.
Corner case fixes for member function pointers.
Python module overhaul by simplifying the generated code and turning most optimizations on by default.
%template improvements wrt scoping to align with C++ explicit template instantiations.
Added support for a command-line options file (sometimes called a response file).
Numerous enhancements and fixes for all supported target languages.
SWIG now classifies the status of target languages into either 'Experimental' or 'Supported' to indicate the expected maturity level.
Support for CFFI, Allegrocl, Chicken, CLISP, S-EXP, UFFI, Pike, Modula3 has been removed.
Octave 4.4-5.1 support added.
PHP5 support removed, PHP7 is now the supported PHP version.
Minimum Python version required is now 2.7, 3.2-3.7 are the only other versions supported.
Added support for Javascript NodeJS versions 2-10.
OCaml support is much improved and updated, minimum OCaml version required is now 3.12.0.

2017/01/28 - SWIG-3.0.12 released

SWIG-3.0.12 summary:

Add support for Octave-4.2.
Enhance %extend to support template functions.
Language specific enhancements and fixes for C#, D, Guile, Java, PHP7.

2016/12/29 - SWIG-3.0.11 released

SWIG-3.0.11 summary:
- PHP 7 support added.
- C++11 alias templates and type aliasing support added.
- Minor fixes and enhancements for C# Go Guile Java Javascript Octave PHP Python R Ruby Scilab XML.

2016/06/12 - SWIG-3.0.10 released

This release fixes a couple of important regressions in SWIG-3.0.9 for smart pointers and importing Python modules.

2016/05/29 - SWIG-3.0.9 released

Summary of changes in SWIG-3.0.9

Add support for Python's implicit namespace packages.
Fixes to support Go 1.6.
C++11 std::array support added for Java.
Improved C++ multiple inheritance support for Java/C# wrappers.
Various other minor fixes and improvements for C#, D, Go, Java, Javascript, Lua, Python, R, Ruby, Scilab.

2015/12/31 - SWIG-3.0.8 released

SWIG-3.0.8 summary:
- pdf documentation enhancements.
- Various Python 3.5 issues fixed.
- std::array support added for Ruby and Python.
- shared_ptr support added for Ruby.
- Minor improvements for CFFI, Go, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby.

2015/08/03 - SWIG-3.0.7 released

SWIG-3.0.7 release summary:
Add support for Octave-4.0.0.
Remove potential Android security exploit in generated Java classes.
* Minor new features and bug fixes.

2015/07/05 - SWIG-3.0.6 released

SWIG-3.0.6 is mostly a stability release.

Release summary:
- Stability and regression fixes.
- Fixed parsing of C++ corner cases.
- Language improvements and bug fixes for C#, Go, Java, Lua, Python, R.

2015/03/07 - Defending the GPL

SWIG is a proud member of the Software Freedom Conservancy who has recently announced that they will be supporting a lawsuit to defend an alleged violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Ensuring this software license, the same one that protects the SWIG source code, is not abused and is actively defended in a court of law is important for everyone using the license.

Conservancy is supporting Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware over GPL violations on Linux. VMware have stated that they would not comply with the GPL after many patient years of negotiations by Christoph and the Conservancy. More information is in the Conservancy's FAQ on the lawsuit.

If you have benefited or enjoyed the fruits of SWIG, it is because the SWIG developer's chose to use a software license to ensure it remains freely available. Please consider supporting Christoph and Conservancy including their fund raising appeal to defend our license.

William Fulton
SWIG lead maintainer

2015/02/01 - SWIG-3.0.5 released

We are pleased to announce SWIG-3.0.5 has been released with the addition of support for Scilab.

This version also contains:

An important Python fix for a regression in SWIG-3.0.3 when wrapping C++ default arguments.
Minor improvements for C#, Go, Octave, PHP and Python.

SWIG-3.0.4 was also released recently and contained part of the Python fix for the regression mentioned above. Python users should definitely rather use 3.0.5.

2014/12/31 - SWIG-3.0.3 released

SWIG-3.0.3 release summary:
- Add support for C++11 strongly typed enumerations.
- Numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements for C#, D, Go, Java,
Javascript, PHP, Perl and Python wrappers.

More detailed release notes can be seen at http://swig.org/release.html

2014/06/04 - SWIG-3.0.2 released

This release has been made to fix a bug during installation, but it also includes a couple of other rather minor changes.

2014/05/27 - SWIG-3.0.1 released

SWIG-3.0.1 is another milestone release as it is the first version to contain support for Javascript.

Release summary:

Javascript module added. This supports JavascriptCore (Safari/Webkit), v8 (Chromium) and node.js currently.
A few notable regressions introduced in 3.0.0 have been fixed - in Lua, nested classes and parsing of operator <<.
The usual round of bug fixes and minor improvements for C#, GCJ, Go, Java, Lua, PHP and Python.

2014/03/16 - SWIG-3.0.0 released

This is a major new release focusing primarily on C++ improvements.

C++11 support added. Please see documentation for details of supported
features: http://www.swig.org/Doc3.0/CPlusPlus11.html
Nested class support added. This has been taken full advantage of in
Java and C#. Other languages can use the nested classes, but require
further work for a more natural integration into the target language.
We urge folk knowledgeable in the other target languages to step
forward and help with this effort.
Lua: improved metatables and support for %nspace.
Go 1.3 support added.
Python import improvements including relative imports.
Python 3.3 support completed.
Perl director support added.
C# .NET 2 support is now the minimum. Generated using statements are
replaced by fully qualified names.
Bug fixes and improvements to the following languages:
C#, Go, Guile, Java, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Octave, R, Ruby, Tcl
Various other bug fixes and improvements affecting all languages.
Note that this release contains some backwards incompatible changes
in some languages.
Full detailed release notes are in the changes file.
See http://swig.org/release.html.

2014/02/09 - SWIG-2.0.12 released

SWIG-2.0.12 summary:
- This is a maintenance release backporting some fixes from the pending 3.0.0 release.
- Octave 3.8 support added.
- C++11 support for new versions of erase/insert in the STL containers.
- Compilation fixes on some systems for the generated Lua, PHP, Python and R wrappers.

2013/09/15 - SWIG-2.0.11 released

SWIG-2.0.11 summary:
- Minor bug fixes and enhancements mostly in Python, but also
C#, Lua, Ocaml, Octave, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl.

2013/05/27 - SWIG-2.0.10 released

SWIG-2.0.10 summary:
- Ruby 1.9 support is now complete.
- Add support for Guile 2.0 and Guile 1.6 support (GH interface) has
been dropped.
- Various small language neutral improvements and fixes.
- Various bug fixes and minor improvements specific to C#, CFFI, D,
Java, Octave, PHP, Python,
- Minor bug fix in ccache-swig.
- Development has moved to Github with Travis continuous integration
testing - patches using https://github.com/swig/swig are welcome.

2013/05/03 - SWIG license explanation

We have recently updated the SWIG legal page to provide clarification on the SWIG license. There has been some confusion as to how the GPL license may or may not affect the code generated by SWIG. Please take a look at the updated SWIG legal page.

We are indebted to the Software Freedom Law Center for all the help given in providing the legal explanations and for originally helping set up the license for version 2.0.

2013/01/03 - SWIG on Github

With the new year we have switched SWIG development to a new development model - Git on Github. The old Subversion history (including the even older CVS history) has been migrated and is now viewable in Github - https://github.com/swig/swig. If you have used SWIG we would really appreciate improvements you have made for incorporation into the mainline SWIG releases. So, feel free to use Github to fork and send your pull requests or patches.

Improvements to the documentation are also very welcome - the html source can be found at https://github.com/swig/swig/tree/master/Doc/Manual.

Information for getting going is on the SWIG website: SWIG Bleeding Edge.

We have also turned on the new SourceForge Allura system which is much slicker than the old SourceForge for submitting bugs/patches - SWIG on SourceForge.

Happy new year!
William

2012/12/16 - SWIG-2.0.9 released

SWIG-2.0.9 summary:
- Improved typemap matching.
- Ruby 1.9 support is much improved.
- Various bug fixes and minor improvements in C#, CFFI, Go, Java,
Modula3, Octave, Perl, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl and in ccache-swig.

2012/11/07 - Summer of Code 2012

GSoC 2012 was SWIG's third Summer of Code, and this year we
received five slots for projects related to SWIG. Out of five,
four students completed the program successfully with valuable
additions to SWIG.

Dmitry Kabak, mentored by Marko Klopcic, worked on SWIG
internals to parse the source code documentation comments within
the C/C++ header files and use them to document the target
language wrapper classes/functions. Dmitry's efforts
complemented the existing support added in GSoC 2008. In
summary, all previously known bugs have been fixed and the
original source code for comment translation was re-factored to
improve performance and maintainability. Parsing of C/C++ source
code has been improved, so that every declaration/definition can
now be commented. Translation of Doxygen tags to Javadoc and
Python docstrings has been improved and corresponding regression
tests have been implemented. The project mentor, Marko Klopcic
has some great ideas for the future GSoC. The work can be tried
out on the branch gsoc2012-doxygen.

Leif Middelschulte, mentored by Vadim Zeitlin, worked on the C
target language module for SWIG. Leif has improved the module
to a working level. He also rationalized and documented the use
of C typemaps and more generally improved documentation and
testing. Finally, the generated C bindings were made more
type-safe to disallow passing of objects of different types.
Unfortunately, a lot of work still remains to be done. In
particular, many problems remain with template support. Leif's
GSoC work can be accessed in the subversion branch gsoc2012-c.

Neha Narang, mentored by Oliver Buchtala, has worked on a
JavaScript module for SWIG, particularly addressing the
JavaScript Core engine. The work is based on prototype work
from Ashish Sharma (JSC) and Oliver Buchtala (V8, design for
unified module). Neha implemented basic features: global
functions and variables, classes, single inheritance, constants,
enums and exception handling. Taking her programming skills in
consideration, some tasks needed more support where Oliver
complemented her work: overloaded functions, using unified
typemap library, namespaces. She added 12 common examples and
started the test-suite writing 32 tests. Additionally, she
created detailed documentation describing design rationale and
module usage. The module is in a good shape considering it is a
new module, but some tasks are left. The next tasks will enhance
the test-suite, and add director support and bring the generator
addressing the V8 engine into a similar state. Neha's work in
GSoC is available in the branch gsoc2012-javascript.

Swati Sharma, mentored by Ashish Sharma, spent her summer
working on the Objective C module for SWIG. SWIG had initial
support for generating Objective C wrappers over C++ which was
added in GSoC 2009. These wrappers will be used to make C/C++
objects available to MacOS X, iphone and ipad applications. The
goal for the summer was to have a cleaner implementation and get
the code in a good shape for merging into trunk. Swati finished
close to meeting the goal with an almost completely re- written,
clean implementation fixing many rough edges. We now have a
more comprehensive set of typemaps for Objective-C and C++ type
conversions. Almost 90% of the test-suite works and a number of
new runtime tests have been added. Makefiles have been
reorganized, and the structure of the generated code redesigned
to equally support Apple's cocoa framework on MacOS X and
GNUStep on Linux/Windows. Swati is very keen to add more
features in the coming months, especially, the director support,
support for clang, and updated module documentation. Swati's
work can be accessed in the branch gsoc2012-objc.

We would like to thank Google for sponsoring the Summer of Code.
A special thanks to all the mentors for their hard work and
William Fulton, the co-administrator, for his guidance and
support.

By: Ashish Sharma, GSoC 2012 administrator for SWIG

2012/08/20 - SWIG-2.0.8 released

SWIG-2.0.8 summary:
- Fix a couple of regressions introduced in 2.0.5 and 2.0.7.
- Improved using declarations and using directives support.
- Minor fixes/enhancements for C#, Java, Octave, Perl and Python.

2012/05/26 - SWIG-2.0.7 released

SWIG-2.0.7 summary:
- Important regression fixes since 2.0.5 for typemaps in general and
in Python.
- Fixes and enhancements for Go, Java, Octave and PHP.

2012/04/30 - SWIG-2.0.6 released

This release fixes a bug in SWIG-2.0.5, please use SWIG-2.0.6 instead.

SWIG-2.0.6 summary:
- Regression fix for Python STL wrappers on some systems.

2012/04/24 - Summer of Code 2012 projects

Google has announced the list of accepted students for the Google Summer of Code program. SWIG was given 5 slots this year the SWIG developer community has chosen the following projects which will be worked on over the next 4 months:

"SWIG's Scilab 6.0 Backend" - Wolfgang Frisch
"Enhance Objective C support" - Swati Sharma
"Get the C backend in shape and into trunk" - Leif Middelschulte
"New module for Javascript" - Neha Narang
"Source Code Documentation Comments" - Dmitry Kabak

Congratulations to Wolfgang, Swati, Leif, Neha and Dmitry.

An abstract for every project is available here: http://google-melange.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2012/swig

Anyone interested in these projects, is welcome to drop by on our IRC channel - #swig-gsoc on irc.freenode.net
or follow the development of them on the swig-devel mailing list - http://www.swig.org/mail.html .

2012/04/19 - SWIG-2.0.5 released

SWIG-2.0.5 summary:
- Official Android support added including documentation and examples.
- Improvements involving templates:
1) Various fixes with templates and typedef types.
2) Some template lookup problems fixed.
3) Templated type fixes to use correct typemaps.
- Autodoc documentation generation improvements.
- Python STL container wrappers improvements including addition of
stepped slicing.
- Approximately 70 fixes and minor enhancements for the following
target languages: AllegroCL, C#, D, Go, Java, Lua, Ocaml, Octave,
Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl, Xml.

2012/03/24 - SWIG in Google Summer of Code 2012

SWIG has been accepted on the Google Summer of Code program for the third time. This is an opportunity for budding open source programmers to get paid for coding. If you are a student and interested please take a look at http://codewrapper.com/wiki/index.php?title=SWIG_GSoC_2012_ideas_page and http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2012 for further details. Applications must be in by 6 April 2012.

2011/05/21 - SWIG-2.0.4 released

SWIG-2.0.4 release summary:
- This is mainly a Python oriented release including support for Python
built-in types for superior performance with the new -builtin option.
The -builtin option is especially suitable for performance-critical
libraries and applications that call wrapped methods repeatedly.
See the python-specific chapter of the SWIG manual for more info.
- Python 3.2 support has also been added and various Python bugs have
been fixed.
- Octave 3.4 support has also been added.
- There are also the usual minor generic improvements, as well as bug
fixes and enhancements for D, Guile, Lua, Octave, Perl and Tcl.

2011/03/29 - SWIG-2.0.3 released

SWIG-2.0.3 has been released. This is a bug fix release including a couple of fixes for regressions in the 2.0 series.

2011/02/20 - SWIG-2.0.2 released

SWIG-2.0.2 has been released and includes the following changes:

- Support for the D language has been added.
- Various bug fixes and minor enhancements.
- Bug fixes particular to the Clisp, C#, Go, MzScheme, Ocaml, PHP, R, Ruby target languages.

2010/10/04 - SWIG-2.0.1 released

SWIG-2.0.1 has been released and includes the following changes:

- Support for the Go language has been added.
- New regular expression (regex) encoder for renaming symbols based on the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library - http://pcre.org .
- Numerous fixes in reporting file and line numbers in error and warning messages.
- Various bug fixes and improvements in the C#, Lua, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python language modules.

2010/06/03 - SWIG-2.0.0 released

SWIG-2.0.0 has been released. The following are the main changes:

- License changes, see LICENSE file and http://www.swig.org/legal.html .
- Much better nested class/struct support.
- Much improved template partial specialization and explicit specialization handling.
- Namespace support improved with the 'nspace' feature where namespaces can be automatically translated into Java packages or C# namespaces.
- Improved typemap and symbol table debugging.
- Numerous subtle typemap matching rule changes when using the default (SWIGTYPE) type. These now work much like C++ class template partial specialization matching.
- Other small enhancements for typemaps. Typemap fragments are also now official and documented.
- Warning and error display refinements.
- Wrapping of shared_ptr is improved and documented now.
- Numerous C++ unary scope operator (::) fixes.
- Better support for boolean expressions.
- Various bug fixes and improvements in the Allegrocl, C#, Java, Lua, Octave, PHP, Python, R, Ruby and XML modules.

2010/04/20 - SWIG joins the Software Freedom Conservancy

The Software Freedom Conservancy has just announced that SWIG has been accepted as a member of the Conservancy - http://sfconservancy.org/news/2010/apr/20/swig-joins/ . Being part of the Conservancy and all the good work it does for free and open source software is great news for SWIG. The Conservancy provides many benefits such as a formal legal structure and will help ensure the vitality of SWIG as the Conservancy is able to handle donations to the SWIG project. Please visit our new http://www.swig.org/donate.html donations page.

2009/09/23 - SWIG's Second Summer of code

SWIG is a programmer's tool designed to make it easier to use C and C++ code from other popular programming languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Java, and C#. 2009 was SWIG's second Summer of Code, and this year we mentored five projects related to SWIG. All five students were very active over the summer period and produced some great new features. In no particular order:

Matevz Jekovec has been busy working at the coal face of SWIG to add support for C++0x, the forthcoming C++ standard. Matevz has managed to achieve close to full support for C++0x. The C++0x Wikipaedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x details the numerous planned new C++0x features and Matevž has put together a SWIG C++0x page (http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2009-matevz/Doc/Manual/Cpp0x.html) documenting the new SWIG support for each of these. In summary the enhanced C++ language can now be parsed by SWIG, which in itself is a great step. There is much more than just this though, as most of the information parsed is used to create useful wrappers of C++0x code. The work can be tried out on the C++0x branch http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2009-matevz which should be merged fairly soon into a forthcoming release.

Miklos Vajna has been working on SWIG's PHP support to implement an advanced SWIG feature already supported for most other target languages, but not PHP. The feature is called "directors" and allows cross-language polymorphism - wrapped C++ classes can be subclassed in PHP and virtual method calls work in the natural way, whether they're made from PHP or C++ code. You can read more in the new PHP Director documentation http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Php.html#Php_nn3 . Miklos made such great progress that we were able to merge this support into SWIG 1.3.40, which was released even before the Summer of Code finished. Miklos also spent some time working on improving SWIG's testsuite for PHP, and fixing bugs in the PHP support.

Ashish Sharma spent the summer adding support for Objective-C as a new target language. Objective-C is a major language on the Mac OS X platform. This means that now SWIG can be used to generate Objective-C wrappers over C++ code. In particular the wrappers include proxy classes, which preserve the class hierarchy from the C++ code. Ultimately this means that from the user's perspective, proxy objects look no different to objects originally written in Objective-C. Adding a new target language is quite a considerable task and Ashish is keen to add plenty more improvements over the coming months. Ashish's work is in Subversion and can be accessed in the ashishs99 branch http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2009-ashishs99 .

Baozeng Ding has also added a new target language, in this case for the Scilab language, a free numerical computing package. He has coded up support for all the C features: variables, functions, constants, enums, structs, unions, pointers and arrays and also intends to develop it further in the near future. Documentation for SWIG and Scilab can be viewed online direct from Baozeng's Subversion branch http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2009-sploving/Doc/Manual/Scilab.html .

Kosei Moriyama has been working on Perl bindings for the Xapian library using SWIG, to replace some existing bindings implemented by hand. He's achieved almost complete compatibility with the API of the existing bindings (the only real omission is callbacks which are waiting for completion of director support for Perl in SWIG). He has also wrapped features which weren't previously accessible from Perl. You can view Kosei's work online in his Subversion branch http://trac.xapian.org/browser/branches/gsoc2009-kosei .

Finally, many thanks to Google for sponsoring the summer of code and a special thanks for all the hard work done by the students, mentors and Olly Betts, the co-administrator.

2009/08/18 - SWIG-1.3.40 released

SWIG-1.3.40 has been release. A summary of changes is as follows:

- SWIG now supports directors for PHP.
- PHP support improved in general.
- Octave 3.2 support added.
- Various bug fixes/enhancements for Allegrocl, C#, Java, Octave, Perl, Python, Ruby and Tcl.
- Other generic fixes and minor new features.

2009/04/21 - Summer of code 2009 accepted projects

The students accepted into the Google Summer of Code have now been announced. SWIG has been allocated five student slots by Google and we have chosen the following five projects/students which will be developed over the next four months:

"Add support for Scilab language" - Baozeng Ding
"C++0x support for Swig" - Matevz Jekovec
"Implement Perl binding for Xapian using SWIG" - Kosei MORIYAMA
"Objective C Wrapper Generator over C++ using SWIG" - Ashish Sharma
"Director support for PHP" - Miklos Vajna

An abstract for each project is available at http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/swig

Congratulations to Baozeng, Matevz, Kosei, Ashish and Miklos, we set some fairly high standards for acceptance this year and you have all done well to meet these standards. We hope that your quality proposals will result in useful enhancements by the end of the summer.

For anyone interested in any of these projects, you are welcome to follow the development of them on the swig-devel mailing list - http://www.swig.org/mail.html . Also feel free to drop by our IRC channel to discuss or just say hello - #swig-gsoc on irc.freenode.net.

William and Olly
SWIG Summer of Code administrators 2009

2009/03/21 - SWIG-1.3.39 released

SWIG-1.3.39 has been release. A summary of changes is shown below.

- Some new small feature enhancements.
- Improved C# std::vector wrappers.
- Bug fixes: mainly Python, but also Perl, MzScheme, CFFI, Allegrocl and Ruby

2009/03/19 - SWIG participating in Summer of Code 2009

We are excited to announce that SWIG has been accepted onto the Google Summer of Code program for the second year running. This is a chance for SWIG to be enhanced in any way that you would like it to.

The Summer of Code program is designed to get new people involved in free/open-source software and get paid for it. Either become a student and code up the changes or if you have an interest in a particular feature being implemented, become a mentor and get paid for looking after a student. The ideas page at http://code.google.com/p/swig-gsoc/wiki/ProjectIdeas contains some suggestions for SWIG, but any reasonable suggestions will be considered. Please chat to us on IRC at #swig-gsoc on irc.freenode.net or email us on the mailing lists. See http://socghop.appspot.com/ for further general information.

2009/02/01 - SWIG-1.3.38 released

SWIG-1.3.38 has been released. It contains an output directory regression fix and other minor bug fixes.

2009/01/15 - SWIG: 1.3.37 released

SWIG is a software development tool that reads C/C++ header files and generates wrapper code to make C/C++ code accessible from other languages including Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, PHP, Java, Ocaml, Lua, C#, Modula-3, R, Octave and Scheme & Lisp variants.

Apart from the usual round of bug fixes and minor new features there are a couple of big new features in this release. The main changes are:

- Python 3 support added
- SWIG now ships with a version of ccache that can be used with SWIG. This enables the files generated by SWIG to be cached so that repeated use of SWIG on unchanged input files speeds up builds quite considerably.
- PHP 4 support removed and PHP support improved in general
- Improved C# array support
- Numerous Allegro CL improvements

2008/10/08 - SWIG's First Summer of Code

SWIG is a programmers tool for semi-automating the calls to C or C++ code from almost any other programming language. The idea is to feed C/C++ header files into SWIG and SWIG then generates the 'glue' code so that your C/C++ library can be used from another language such as Python, Java, C#, Ruby, Perl etc. In fact there are implementations for supporting over 20 different of these target languages. The summer of code students have had a productive summer and have extended the number of languages and features supported in SWIG's first Google Summer of Code.

Haoyu Bai has added support for the upcoming Python 3 release. Python is the most popular target language amongst SWIG users and no doubt this addition will be much appreciated by those who are thinking of upgrading to Python 3. Also Haoyu has provided new Python 3 features which make coding faster and simpler when using Python extension code. The main features added are function annotations, buffer interfaces and abstract base classes and are outlined in more detail here: http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2008-bhy/Doc/Manual/Python.html#Python_python3support

Jan Jezabek has added a new 'language' module providing Windows Component Object Model (COM) support. This new module makes it possible for any COM enabled language to easily call into C or C++ libraries. The COM module in SWIG is more powerful than most as it ultimately provides support for more than one language as there are numerous languages that can call into COM libraries. Compiled languages such as Visual Basic and scripting languages, such as JScript, VBA and VBScript that can run on the Windows Scripting Host are probably the most popular to benefit. A great use will be the ease of making C/C++ libraries available in applications supporting the various Basic dialects, such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. SWIG makes it easy to utilise more advanced C++ code, such as templates, and the COM module is no different here as Jan has added in very comprehensive coverage of the C and C++ languages, full details here: http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2008-jezabek/Doc/Manual/COM.html

Maciej Drwal has added a module for calling C++ code from C code. It is now possible to automatically create a flattened API of C++ classes so that the C++ functionality is available in the form of easy to use C structs and global functions. For example, features such as C++ template classes / functions are easily callable from C. One cool part of this project is the graceful handling of C++ exceptions in the calling C code. Some introductory documentation is available here: http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2008-maciekd/Doc/Manual/C.html

Cheryl Foil has added an interesting feature to improve code documentation in the target language. This works when C/C++ code is documented using the industry standard Doxygen tool for annotating methods, classes, variables etc. The new feature extracts the Doxygen comments from the code for use by one of the many target languages. Cheryl has added initial support for Java so that the Doxygen comments are turned into JavaDoc comments embedded into the generated Java wrappers, see http://swig.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/swig/branches/gsoc2008-cherylfoil/Doc/Manual/Doxygen.html

Lastly, many thanks to the mentors involved in making this happen, Ian Appru, Olly Betts, Richard Boulton and William Fulton and finally to Google for funding a great programme.

2008/06/24 - SWIG-1.3.36 released

SWIG-1.3.36 has been released. The major changes are listed below.

- Enhancement to directors to wrap all protected members
- Optimisation feature for objects returned by value
- A few bugs fixes in the PHP, Java, Ruby, R, C#, Python, Lua and Perl modules
- Other minor generic bug fixes

2008/05/03 - Summer of Code students

2008/04/21 The students accepted into the Google Summer of Code have now been announced. SWIG has managed to get four slots and we have chosen the following four projects/students:

* "SWIG's Python 3.0 Backend" - Haoyu Bai tutored by Richard Boulton
* "C target language backend" - Maciej Drwal tutored by William Fulton
* "Comment 'Translator' for SWIG" - Cheryl Marie Foil tutored by Olly Betts
* "Support for generating COM wrappers" - Jan Jezabek tutored by Ian Appru

The competition was tough and although it was difficult choosing the projects, these four were our strongest, so congratulations and welcome to Haoyu, Jan, Cheryl and Maciej. Further details on the Google SWIG page - http://code.google.com/soc/2008/swig/about.html .

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