[cable] Re: cable digest, Vol 1 #55 - 4 msgs

[Steven Levitt]

I sincerely apologize for my choice of "smelly" terms in previous posts. I
didn't mean to offend anyone at Kitware. As I tried to indicate, I truly do
appreciate the contributions that Kitware and others have made to the open
source community. Tools like Cable and CableSwig are sorely needed in the
C++ world.

My choice of words, though poor, was made in reaction to the lack of
documentation of CableSwig's features and limiitations, even in summary
form. On reflection, this is really the more significant issue. Open source
or otherwise, not enough developers pay attention to matters of
documentation. Ten minutes spent on writing a brief rationale for the tool
would have saved me many hours of effort. Without documentation, I was left
with the impression that CableSwig had all of SWIG's capabilities, but
without the need to write SWIG interface files. In fact, I had assumed that
CableSwig simply generated the SWIG interface files, not that it was an
integrated tool.

I was attempting to evaluate whether CableSwig would help us to overcome
some problems my co-workers were encountering with plain-vanilla SWIG.
We're attempting to wrap a large number of C structures, which SWIG should
support. However, my co-workers are complaining that in many cases SWIG is
generating wrappers that have limitations, particularly in the case of
handling C arrays. Also, in some cases, the structures are not "pure"
C--they've been "corrupted," and a little C++ has found it's way in. For
instance, some structures have nested enumerations and structures, which I
am given to understand SWIG cannot handle automatically.  From remarks made
on this list and others, I believe that handling nested structures was one
of the purposes of CableSwig.

What came as quite a surprise was that CableSwig doesn't handle C
structures at all, and I had wasted my time.

I appreciate your invitation to add the necessary code to handle public
data members myself, but I think you'll agree that this isn't a task easily
accomplished without intimate knowledge of both SWIG and Cable internals.
It's probably not something I can spend time on at the moment, but if the
opportunity arises, I hope that you would be willing to give me another
chance and allow me to work with you to improve the tool.

Let me again express my regret over my choice of words, and my hope that we
can still collaborate in an friendly way, on this list and in other forums,
to our mutual benefit.



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