Re: lgtk-0.0.3 - experimental gtk bindings for Common Lisp

On Sunday 02 November 2003 05:15 pm, Frédéric Brunel wrote:
> the way, I've looked some time ago to GTK bindings for other languages
> like Python and C# (using Mono). The guys have first developped a way
> to generate all these bindings from C headers. There is some .defs
> files describing GTK C headers with S-exprs. Do you know something
> about that?

For what it's worth...

For at least the past two years, I have used SWIG (www.swig.org) to
generate bindings for C++ routines for a Lisp-like language, and
wanted to extend that use for CMUCL bindings for arbitrary CV/C++
code.  It took about 2K worth of C++ to generate a new SWIG
"back-end."

However, even the SWIG guys have said that the hardest part is the
parsing of the C++ code (doh!  what a non-surprise to
S-expression-oriented people).  I got hit pretty hard by this.  SWIG
would often keel over on perfectly legal C++ code, and it didn't
really know what to do with templates.

However, within the past month or so I stumbled upon "gccxml" (use
Google).  It looks like a much better way to go (although I have only
gone so far as to download it and run it on very small test cases).
Since it spits out XML (hey, it could be worse), I think it would be
possible to do all the FFI stuff in Lisp.  I have only gone so far as
to begin to explore which is the Common Lisp XML implementation of
choice.  I would be interested in comments/advice from the clump
community...

-jm

-- 
==== John Morrison
==== MAK Technologies Inc.
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