Announce: SWIG1.3a4 (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator)

[Matthias Koeppe <mkoeppe at saturn dot Math dot Uni-Magdeburg dot DE>]

This is to announce release 1.3a4 of SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and
Interface Generator, http://www.swig.org).  SWIG parses C/C++ headers
and generates wrapper functions for a variety of high-level
programming languages, including Guile.

SWIG's Guile support features many improvements over release 1.1p5.

 * C pointers are represented by smobs. (They used to be mangled into
   strings.)
   
 * Memory leaks and type conversion bugs have been fixed.

 * The Guile module system, including dynamic loading, is supported.

 * Guile exceptions are supported.

 * A typemap-driven procedure-documentation system has been added
   (requires Guile 1.4).

This release has been tested extensively with Guile 1.4 on GNU/Linux
and Solaris 7.

The official announcement is included below.

--------------------------------------------------
*** ANNOUNCE : SWIG1.3 (Alpha 4) ***

September 4, 2000

Overview
--------
We're pleased to announce the next installment of the SWIG1.3
redevelopment effort.  This release represents a reasonably stable
snapshot of the CVS repository that has undergone extensive testing
and debugging.  However, this release also represents work in progress
so there may be obscure bugs and problems that we haven't found yet.
Please send us your feedback.

Availability:
-------------
The release is available for download on Sourceforge at

     http://download.sourceforge.net/swig/swig1.3a4.tar.gz

What's new?
-----------
On the surface, this release still looks a lot like SWIG1.1p5 except
that a lot of bugs have been fixed and the language modules tend to
generate smaller and more efficient wrappers. New modules have also
been added to support Ruby and Mzscheme. In addition, Python, Perl,
and Guile support has been enhanced to support new releases such as
Python1.6 and Perl5.6.

Under the hood, you will find that this release is an almost complete
reimplementation of SWIG's internals.  In fact the only code that
still remains from SWIG1.1 is the C/C++ parser and the language
modules (all of which have undergone significant changes as well).  As
a result, a lot of minor improvements can be found throughout the
system and things that used to cause problems may now work (for
instance, pointers to functions are now supported).  In addition, this
release incorporates a number of feature requests that have been made
on the mailing list.

What's broken?
--------------
As this is a work in progress, a number of features are still missing
or incomplete.  The documentation system is still missing and won't be
reimplemented for some time.  The Java module is also temporarily out
of service for this release.  In addition, C++ programmers who make
extensive use of typemaps may encounter a few strange problems
(although SWIG will generate warning messages).

We need your help!
------------------
Even if you are perfectly happy with SWIG1.1, we can use your
feedback.  First, we like to know about compilation problems and other
issues concerning the building of SWIG.  Second, if SWIG1.3 is unable
to compile your old interface files, we would like to get information
about the features you are using.  This information will help us find
bugs in the SWIG1.3 release, develop techniques for supporting
backwards compatibility, and write documentation that addresses
specific issues related to migrating from SWIG1.1 to SWIG1.3.
Finally, we are still looking for volunteers to work on aspects of
SWIG development.  Please send email to beazley@cs.uchicago.edu for
details.

Please report problems with this release to swig-dev@cs.uchicago.edu.

--- The SWIG Developers

David Beazley 
Thien-Thi Nguyen
Matthias Köppe
Masaki Fukushima
Harco de Hilster
Loic Dachary
Oleg Tolmatcev
--------------------------------------------------
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