[Kde-bindings] PerlQt bindings ans SWIG ?

[Richard Dale]

On Thursday 04 June 2009 05:58:36 pm Dominique Dumont wrote:
> Hello
>
> I just wonder if generating Qt binding for Perl with SWIG [1] was
> considered ?
I did try to update some existing SWIG based Ruby Qt bindings from Qt2 to Qt3 
before the PerlQt Qt3 was started. However, back in early 2002 the Ruby 
version of SWIG couldn't handle overloaded method calls or allow virtual 
methods to be overriden. So in the end I decided that the results weren't 
really good enough and scrapped the project. 

The Smoke libs tend to be smaller than conventional alternatives. On reason is 
that the overloaded method resolution is handled in each language's runtime, 
as opposed to being done in the generated code with the same logic duplicated 
many times over.

> SWIG is able to parse C++ header files and generate the bindings for Perl
> (among other languages like Python, Ruby Java) See [2] for more details.
>
> Would that be possible ?
Although SWIG works for multiple target languages, it generates different code 
for each one and you also need to maintain language specific interface files. 
The Smoke libs are generated directly from the headers and can be used by 
multiple  languages (Perl, Ruby, PHP, C# and Common Lisp at present). Having 
common libs for different languages is less important if you are only doing Qt 
programming, but I think it is quite a big advantage with KDE bindings.

-- Richard