[Insight-developers] [Insight-users] INSIGHT JOURNAL: managedITK (ITK 3.8 ?) & Release Schedule

[Bill Hoffman]

Dan Mueller wrote:
> Hi Bill,
> 
> 2008/7/15 Bill Hoffman <bill.hoffman at kitware.com>:
>> I am going to make some harsh statements at this point....  Sorry Dan...
> 
> Go right ahead.
> 
>> My guess is spatial objects are not wrapped because it would have to be done
>> by hand.  ManagedITK, while it manages to wrap the current ITK, is IMO
>> unmaintainable.  It is essentially a hand wrapping of ITK.  There is no
>> parsing of the C++ headers.  Each and every method that is wrapped by
>> ManagedITK has to be specified in the cmake files for ManagedITK.
> 
> I never claimed ManagedITK had automated wrapping. Sorry if you feel
> mislead in this regard.

I did not think you ever made that claim. However, I suspect that some 
folks have made the mistake of thinking it was automated.    In 
conversations with Luis, I don't think he understood it.  Wrapping is 
sort of assumed to be automatic like it is for VTK and the other ITK 
wrappers.  We (Kitware) have been doing automatic wrapping for 15+ years 
now, it is just assumed that is how you do wrapping.

The swig based wrapping should be cleaned up in the next year.   WrapITK 
is a great start.  (I really wish I had thought of generating swig .i 
files from the start, instead of linking in swig c code....)   Once we 
are generating swig .i files it should not be that hard to support any 
language that swig supports.

Using gccxml to parse the .h files would not be that hard either.  The 
Cable part of CableSwig is a complete c++ representation of C++, and is 
quite easy to traverse the objects and create output just like your hand 
coded CLI stuff.  However, the swig folks seem to be pretty good at 
wrapping, and it would be nice to take advantage of what they have done 
as much as possible.

Again, this is not meant to be an attack, more of a full discloser to 
folks.   Email, is a horrible way to have a conversation like this one, 
but it is the best we have... :)


-Bill