Proposed Modification for SWIG/Ruby

This note describes a perceived problem with SWIG's Ruby module and the
proposed
solution. Before I proceed with implementing the solution in the development
version of SWIG I wanted to run it by the SWIG developers' list and the Ruby
community at large. Any comments and suggestions are appreciated.

The Problem
============

The SWIG/Ruby module's current treatment for C++ class constructors is to
generate a "new" singleton method only. For example, consider the following
SWIG interface file:

    class Base
    {
    public:
        Base();
    };

which results in the following wrapper function:

    static VALUE
    _wrap_new_Base(int argc, VALUE *argv, VALUE self) {
        Base *result;
        VALUE vresult = Qnil;

        if ((argc < 0) || (argc > 0))
            rb_raise(rb_eArgError, "wrong # of arguments(%d for 0)",argc);
        result = (Base *) new Base();
        vresult = SWIG_NewPointerObj((void *) result, SWIGTYPE_p_Base, 1);
        return vresult;
    }

which is correctly registered as a singleton method for the Base class. On
its
own this works properly; when the resulting extension module is imported by
Ruby you can create Base instances and they do the right thing.

The problem occurs when you try to derive a new Ruby class from this
extension
module class and the argument list for the derived class' initialize method
doesn't exactly match that for the base class, e.g.

    class Derived < Base
      def initialize(x, y)
        super
        @x, @y = x, y
      end
    end

    d = Derived.new(2.0, 3.0)

This will cause an ArgumentError exception to be raised since you're passing
two
arguments (2.0, 3.0) into Base.new, which expects no arguments.

The Solution
============

The correct solution is for SWIG to generate two different Ruby methods for
each C++ class constructor it wraps. We still need a "new" singleton method,
which would look something like this:

    static VALUE
    _wrap_new_Base(int argc, VALUE *argv, VALUE self) {
        VALUE vresult = SWIG_NewPointerObj((void *) result, SWIGTYPE_p_Base,
1);
        rb_obj_call_init(vresult, argc, argv);
        return vresult;
    }

but we'd also generate an initialize method, which would look something like
this:

    static VALUE
    _wrap_Base_initialize(int argc, VALUE *argv, VALUE self) {
        Base *result;
        if ((argc < 0) || (argc > 0))
            rb_raise(rb_eArgError, "wrong # of arguments(%d for 0)", argc);
        result = (Base *) new Base();
        DATA_PTR(self) = result;
        return self;
    }

This seems consistent with how most (non-SWIGged) Ruby extension modules
handle
Ruby's two-step object creation and initialization process. It doesn't quite
fit
SWIG's model of mapping a C++ constructor to exactly one wrapper function,
but
I've modified a local copy of SWIG to get the job done.