[Chicken-users] SWIG and chicken

[John Lenz]

I just completed a whole bunch of changes, improvements, and bug fixes on  
the chicken module in SWIG CVS.  Seeing as we are planning a new SWIG  
release in a couple of weeks, I would appreciate people testing this and  
perhaps giving SWIG another look.

1) Whole bunch of documentation updates.  I wrote a new section about the  
different ways of linking together multiple modules, and also wrote an  
example of how to use SWIG to build a chicken extension library (in the  
form of an .egg).  I also updated the docs for the new features.

I stuck a copy of the updated doc on my web site
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~lenz/swig/Chicken.html

2) Exception support.  For C++ functions that throw exceptions, SWIG will  
catch the C++ exception and then raise a scheme exception.

3) Garbage collection for wrapped classes. Classes no longer have explicit  
destructor functions that must be called.  The destructors are registered  
as chicken finalizers.

4) Overloaded functions now work properly, both in the primitive case and  
the TinyCLOS -proxy case.  (The one problem is the limitation of TinyCLOS  
generics, see the "tinyclos and variable argument functions" thread on this  
list.  I wrote a few paragraphs about this and how to get around this  
inside the documentation).

5) %import now adds (declare (uses ...)) when running SWIG with -proxy

6) A whole bunch of bug fixes for different typemaps... the entire SWIG  
test-suite now passes, with the exception of the tests of std::vector<> and  
the like.

John