This page provides a short summary of the survey results obtained from users who opted to fill in the SWIG Survey when downloading the distribution. While these are not necessarily accurate usage figures, they give a reasonably good indication of the most popular languages that SWIG users are interested in.

SWIG is a tool to help wrap code from the input C or C++ header files and make the code available in many different target languages. The first graph below shows the top 10 most popular target languages for SWIG users.

Python has clearly been the most popular over the years with Java and C# vying for second place. The bottom 7 in the top 10 are PHP, Perl, Ruby, XML, Tcl, Go and Chicken and range in popularity by 4% down to 1%. These usage patterns are broadly in line with popular programming usage, for example, as reported in the TIOBE index. SWIG's input languages are C and C++ and these along with the top three SWIG target languages (Python, Java, C#) comprise the top five TIOBE languages in 2016. Other trends such as Go rising in popularity and Perl falling in popularity over the years are reflected in SWIG usage patterns.

The following graph shows the next 10 most popular SWIG target languages. Interest in these has varied slightly over the years, but most hover around the 0.5% to 1.5% popularity mark.

The final graph below gives an indication of the operating systems that are being used for SWIG. Windows, Linux and OSX are clearly the favourite operating systems followed by a variety of other Unix variants. There is a notable decline for Solaris and an increase in Mac OSX popularity over the years.

These graphs were last updated with data to August 2016.

Last modified : Mon Oct 7 20:29:14 2024