Hello,
I brought up this subject on #clasp IRC, but thought I would move the discussion to the mailing list.
[IRC log: http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/clasp?around=2015-06-19T16:13:25&types... ]
I'm looking into wrapping a large C++ library with CL. The library is an implementation of Open Inventor, coin, which is a C++ scene graph library based on OpenGL. I think eventually it would be an interesting project to port Open Inventor to CL natively. However, at present what I want to do is call it from CL. (For those of you doing chemistry with Clasp, having Open Inventor as a library in Lisp could help integrate the visualization of molecules into your workflow.)
[Coin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin3D ]
Currently, Clasp provides a lot of what I need to wrap Open Inventor. However, I would like to automatically parse (a large number of) C++ header files and generate CL bindings without writing a lot of boilerplate. I think it would be good idea to support both the native method Clasp uses, as well as standard FFI(s). As a side effect it would be nice to be able to produce a generic C API from the C++. The SGI release of Open Inventor had such a C API, and its conventions are documented. Open Inventor might be good starting point to automate wrapper generation, because the interface uses a limited subset of C++ features, having been written in the '90s.
I looked into using SWIG ( www.swig.org ), which is a general purpose wrapper for C/C++. Although I have successfully used it for projects in the past, SWIG is somewhat opaque (to me). It would be a good source of concrete techniques for this project though.
I'm willing to contribute to Clasp to add this capability, but I had a few further questions before I jumped in:
1) Should we add this capability to the subproject clbind? Create a new subproject?
2) Should we make the tool modular, so we can add other native bindings? I don't think we should re-invent SWIG, but you never know.
3) Is there a contribution policy for Clasp? Do you have a copyright assignment form?
4) Is the Clasp project ready for some high level documentation or is it in flux? I am willing to write documentation as I learn the system. I prefer to do it in LaTex.
Thanks,
(o> ( ) --++--Andy