SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator) Version: 2.0.6 (30 April 2012) Tagline: SWIG is a compiler that integrates C and C++ with languages including Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, PHP, Java, Ocaml, Lua, Scheme (Guile, MzScheme, CHICKEN), Pike, C#, Modula-3, Common Lisp (CLISP, Allegro CL, CFFI, UFFI), Octave and R. SWIG reads annotated C/C++ header files and creates wrapper code (glue code) in order to make the corresponding C/C++ libraries available to the listed languages, or to extend C/C++ programs with a scripting language. Up-to-date SWIG related information can be found at http://www.swig.org A SWIG FAQ and other hints can be found on the SWIG Wiki: http://www.dabeaz.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl License ======= Please see the LICENSE file for details of the SWIG license. Release Notes ============= Please see the CHANGES.current file for a detailed list of bug fixes and new features for the current release. The CHANGES file contains bug fixes and new features for older versions. A summary of changes in each release can be found in the RELEASENOTES file. Backwards Compatibility ======================= The developers strive their best to preserve backwards compatibility between releases, but this is not always possible as the overriding aim is to provide the best wrapping experience. Where backwards compatibility is known to be broken, it is clearly marked as an incompatibility in the CHANGES and CHANGES.current files. See the documentation for details of the SWIG_VERSION preprocessor symbol if you have backward compatibility issues and need to use more than one version of SWIG. Windows Installation ==================== Please see the Doc/Manual/Windows.html file for instructions on installing SWIG on Windows and running the examples. The Windows distribution is called swigwin and includes a prebuilt SWIG executable, swig.exe, included in the same directory as this README file. Otherwise it is exactly the same as the main SWIG distribution. There is no need to download anything else. Unix Installation ================= You must use GNU `make' to build SWIG. http://www.gnu.org/software/make/ PCRE needs to be installed on your system to build SWIG, in particular pcre-config must be available. If you have PCRE headers and libraries but not pcre-config itself or, alternatively, wish to override the compiler or linker flags returned by pcre-config, you may set PCRE_LIBS and PCRE_CFLAGS variables to be used instead. And if you don't have PCRE at all, the configure script will provide instructions for obtaining it. To build and install SWIG, simply type the following: % ./configure % make % make install By default SWIG installs itself in /usr/local. If you need to install SWIG in a different location or in your home directory, use the --prefix option to ./configure. For example: % ./configure --prefix=/home/yourname/projects % make % make install Note: the directory given to --prefix must be an absolute pathname. Do *NOT* use the ~ shell-escape to refer to your home directory. SWIG won't work properly if you do this. The file INSTALL details more about using configure. Also try % ./configure --help. The configure script will attempt to locate various packages on your machine including Tcl, Perl5, Python and all the other target languages that SWIG uses. Don't panic if you get 'not found' messages--SWIG does not need these packages to compile or run. The configure script is actually looking for these packages so that you can try out the SWIG examples contained in the 'Examples' directory without having to hack Makefiles. Note that the --without-xxx options, where xxx is a target language, have minimal effect. All they do is reduce the amount of testing done with 'make check'. The SWIG executable and library files installed cannot currently be configured with a subset of target languages. Please see the Documentation section below on installing documentation as none is installed by default. SWIG used to include a set of runtime libraries for some languages for working with multiple modules. These are no longer built during the installation stage. However, users can build them just like any wrapper module as described in the documentation, Doc/Manual/Modules.html. The CHANGES file also lists some examples which build the runtime library. Notes: (1) If you checked the code out via SVN, you will have to run ./autogen.sh before typing 'configure'. In addition, a full build of SWIG requires the a number of packages to be installed. Full instructions at http://www.swig.org/svn.html Macintosh OS X Installation ============================ SWIG is known to work on various flavors of OS X. Follow the Unix installation instructions above. However, as of this writing, there is still great deal of inconsistency with how shared libaries are handled by various scripting languages on OS X. We've tried to resolve these differences to the extent of our knowledge. Users of OS X should be aware that Darwin handles shared libraries and linking in a radically different way than most Unix systems. In order to test SWIG and run the examples, SWIG configures itself to use flat namespaces and to allow undefined symbols (-flat_namespace -undefined suppress). This mostly closely follows the Unix model and makes it more likely that the SWIG examples will work with whatever installation of software you might have. However, this is generally not the recommended technique for building larger extension modules. Instead, you should utilize Darwin's two-level namespaces. Some details about this can be found here http://developer.apple.com/documentation/ReleaseNotes/DeveloperTools/TwoLevelNamespaces.html Needless to say, you might have to experiment a bit to get things working at first. Testing ======= If you want to test SWIG before installation, type the following: % make -k check 'make -k check' requires at least one of the target languages to be installed. If it fails, it may mean that you have an uninstalled language module or that the file 'Examples/Makefile' has been incorrectly configured. It may also fail due to compiler issues such as broken C++ compiler. Even if 'make -k check' fails, there is a pretty good chance SWIG still works correctly---you will just have to mess around with one of the examples and some makefiles to get it to work. Some tests may also fail due to missing dependency packages, eg PCRE or Boost, but this will require careful analysis of the configure output. The testing suite executed by 'make -k check' is designed to stress-test many parts of the implementation including obscure corner cases. If some of these tests fail or generate warning messages, there is no reason for alarm---the test may be related to some new SWIG feature or a difficult bug that we're trying to resolve. Chances are that SWIG will work just fine for you. Note that if you have more than one CPU/core, then you can use parallel make to speed up the check as it does take quite some time to run, for example: % make -j2 -k check Also, SWIG's support for C++ is sufficiently advanced that certain tests may fail on older C++ compilers (for instance if your compiler does not support member templates). These errors are harmless if you don't intend to use these features in your own programs. Note: The test-suite currently contains over 500 tests. If you have many different target languages installed and a slow machine, it might take more than an hour to run the test-suite. Examples ======== The Examples directory contains a variety of examples of using SWIG and it has some browsable documentation. Simply point your browser to the file "Example/index.html". The Examples directory also includes Visual C++ project (.dsp) files for building some of the examples on Windows. Known Issues ============ There are minor known bugs, details of which are in the bug tracker, see http://www.swig.org/bugs.html. Troubleshooting =============== In order to operate correctly, SWIG relies upon a set of library files. If after building SWIG, you get error messages like this, % swig foo.i :1. Unable to find 'swig.swg' :3. Unable to find 'tcl8.swg' it means that SWIG has either been incorrectly configured or installed. To fix this: 1. Make sure you remembered to do a 'make install' and that the installation actually worked. Make sure you have write permission on the install directory. 2. If that doesn't work, type 'swig -swiglib' to find out where SWIG thinks its library is located. 3. If the location is not where you expect, perhaps you supplied a bad option to configure. Use ./configure --prefix=pathname to set the SWIG install location. Also, make sure you don't include a shell escape character such as ~ when you specify the path. 4. The SWIG library can be changed by setting the SWIG_LIB environment variable. However, you really shouldn't have to do this. If you are having other troubles, you might look at the SWIG Wiki at http://www.dabeaz.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl. Documentation ============= The Doc/Manual directory contains the most recent set of updated documentation for this release. The documentation is available in three different formats, each of which contains identical content. These format are, pdf (Doc/Manual/SWIGDocumentation.pdf), single page html (Doc/Manual/SWIGDocumentation.html) or multiple page html (other files in Doc/Manual). Please select your chosen format and copy/install to wherever takes your fancy. There is some technical developer documentation available in the Doc/Devel subdirectory. This is not necessarily up-to-date, but it has some information on SWIG internals. Participate! ============ Please report any errors and submit patches (if possible)! We only have access to a limited variety of hardware (Linux, Solaris, OS-X, and Windows). All contributions help. If you would like to join the SWIG development team or contribute a language module to the distribution, please contact the swig-devel mailing list, details at http://www.swig.org/mail.html. -- The SWIG Maintainers