Re: [Chicken-users] [Chicken-hackers] [Proposal] Officially drop SWIG support?

[Ivan Raikov]

I am not sure SWIG ever worked in Chicken 4, and furthermore I am not
sure SWIG itself is that well maintained.
At this point Chicken provides a number of good tools for FFI, so
there really is no point in trying to support SWIG.

  -Ivan

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 6:53 AM, Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I was browsing our code a bit and noticed that we have a special
> "swig pointer" type.  However, there seems no way to construct
> it from Scheme and as far as I remember, SWIG support has bitrotted
> to the point of being useless.  This is also mentioned in the
> manual at http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/4/Unit%20lolevel#foreign-pointers
> Besides, I don't really understand why SWIG needs a special pointer
> type for it.
>
> If you look at the documentation at the SWIG site itself, it is full
> of pre-CHICKEN 4 anachonisms; it still mentions only "units", no
> modules, it refers to TinyCLOS as the go-to library for OOP, it mentions
> a program called "chicken-config" which has been removed before we
> even migrated CHICKEN to the subversion repository. Behold:
> http://swig.org/Doc3.0/Chicken.html
>
> Since nobody is really maintaining SWIG support in CHICKEN, it may be
> better to just drop compatibility altogether rather than keep lugging
> this undead legacy stuff around.  Removing some of this may also make
> some pointer operations faster as we don't need to check for the SWIG
> pointer type.  This is probably a very minimal improvement, though.
>
> So what do you all think?  Should we drop SWIG support for CHICKEN 5?
> Is anyone still using SWIG?
>
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
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