Re: scripting interfaces for gsl

[Brian Gough <bjg@netsci.freeserve.co.uk>]

I have used SWIG with Perl and Python by manually building separate
libgsl*.so files in each directory. It worked ok. I haven't tried FFI. 

Klaus Schilling wrote:
> 
> I once tried to interface parts of the gsl 0.3 to the scheme-based scripting
> /extension language 'guile'. The change from 0.3 to 0.4 broke everything,
> and I'm now just wrapping the functions I just need through libguile, until
> guile and gsl both come to a greater stability level.
> 
> Have there been also efforts for other scripting languages, such as tcl,
> python, perl, pike etc. ?
> 
> I didn't try SWIG yet with gsl. Anyone experimented with it?
> Another way to interface C libs from interpreters is over an ffi, and a
> very good one has been provided by Anthony Green from Cygnus. Marius Vollmer
> wrote a guile frontend for it, maybe other language frontends are available
> too. FFIs seem to be very useful for occasional usage of library routines,
> but require a shared lib, which doesn't exist yet portably in the case of GSL.
> As far as error handling goes, my preferred way is to throw an exception
> with the error number as argument for the exception handler, so that the
> VHLL coder can decide how to deal with errors, and still avoid segfaults.
> Is that a good way for wrapping gsl routines that return 0 on success, -1
> on error?
> --
> Klaus Schilling