Hi, I just received an email from Joris van der Hoeven. In case somebody wishes to give it a try. Have fun -richy. -- Richard B. Kreckel <http://www.ginac.de/~kreckel/> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 16:45:34 +0200 (CEST) From: Joris van der Hoeven <vdhoeven@texmacs.org> To: mathemagix-devel@mathemagix.org Cc: kreckel@thep.physik.uni-mainz.de, haible@ilog.fr Subject: Writing bindings for C++ (template) libraries in Mathemagix Hi All, I am happy to announce that the new version 0.1.41 of Mathemagix (available from mathemagix.org) should allow you to easily glue C++ libraries as well as C++ template libraries to the interpreter. The main mechanism is as follows: from an abstract description of your library in a file like 'myglue.mmh' (see the examples provided in src/glue), the mmx-extend script automatically generates a C++ file which is compiled as a shared library 'mmx-myglue.so'. This library can be loaded dynamically into Mathemagix via 'use "myglue"'. Your library may also contain templates and the mmx-extend script *automatically* creates an extension of your library which enables you to use these templates in a generic way. I.e., having a template class "Matrix", you will typically be able to use matrices over matrices over matrices over integers. Moreover, this generic extension should imply only a minimal overhead. In the above matrix example, and as long as the operations on the scalars are implemented in your library, no re-entrant calls to Mathemagix are needed and operations are done quickly using some void* magic. The code has been (incompletely) tested together with several libraries (STL, Gmp, Synaps and Mmxlib) and contributions in this direction would be *very much* appreciated. Apart from completing the existing binding files, support for the following mathematical libraries would be nice: mpfr mpfi CLN NTL GiNaC Linbox libfactory CGAL etc. Further suggestions for interesting scientific libraries are welcome, the aim being to focus on incorporating as much existing software as possible before starting to write programs in Mathemagix itself. It would also be interesting to have bindings for libraries like gtk, qt, opengl, unicode, cryptography, etc. etc. Some shortcomings of the current implementation are as follows: * The GC garbage collector from Boehm seems to be bugged; it does not allow the use of dynamic libraries ;^( You may either configure Mathemagix using ./configure --disable-gc or add an additional section for your library in the current configure.in file, add your bindings to the src/glue directory and use static compilation. * It is only possible to import generic routines from Mathemagix. Such routines correspond to the operations you wish to perform on types which occur as template arguments (like the scalar type for matrices). It is not possible yet to import ordinary routines or types from Mathemagix. As a consequence, if you want to write bindings for several libraries, then you usually have to produce the glue for all of them together. From an efficiency point of view, this is better anyway. * The names of exported C++ classes and functions should be of the form "identifier" or "identifier<id1,...,idn>". Special syntactic forms for operations like "x.f", "x->f", "x::f", etc. are not provided yet. You may always add the necessary macros or code to the preamble though. * There may still be some bugs. Feedback on this is appreciated. Don't hesitate to ask further questions on this list. Any feedback is appreciated. Best wishes, Joris