[ruby-talk:12867] RE: [Swig] SWIG and Ruby

> :). So the question is: did anybody try and use SWIG
> (http://swig.sourceforge.net/) to build Ruby
> (http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/)
> extensions? Any tips/tricks/success stories to share? Any kind of
> consensus reached in any past discussions?

Luigi,

I am using a modified version of SWIG1.3a5 to develop FXRuby, the Ruby
language bindings for the FOX GUI toolkit:

	http://fxruby.sourceforge.net

There are a few shortcomings in the current Ruby module for SWIG, especially
with regards to wrapping C++ class libraries like mine. One problem was with
how C++ class constructors are "wrapped" for Ruby. For Ruby, we really want
to expose both the "new" singleton method for the class as well as an
"initialize" instance method that derived classes can override. The current
implementation in SWIG only generates the "new" method. There was another
problem related to wrapping functions with more than default argument
values. And probably some other minor ones I've forgotten.

For the time being I've just implemented some custom hacks to SWIG to get
around these problems, but I think they should eventually be incorporated
into the official SWIG distribution. But perhaps that should wait until Dave
is ready for the SWIG1.3a6 release later this summer (or whenever).

Lyle