liblo-devel Mailing List for LibLO

Hello, liblo community!

There hasn't been much LibLo activity lately, but I thought I might
play around with SWIG a little and decided that this would probably be
a great opportunity to make an addition to LibLo, allowing it to be
plugged into many scripting languages.  (I'm aware of a Python binding
pyliblo, but it might be nice to have something consistent across
several languages.)

So far it's been fairly simple.  An interface file including the liblo
headers exposes all the functionality.  The only problem is that (and
least in Python, which I'm using for testing), it doesn't destroy
objects properly and complains about memory leaks, so I've had to add
information about constructors and destructors, like so:

typedef struct {
  %extend {
    lo_message() { lo_message *m = malloc(sizeof(void*));
                   *m = lo_message_new(); return m; }
    ~lo_message() { lo_message_free(*$self); free($self); }
  }
} lo_message;

Conceptually this same C++-ish interface could be used to add the
"message" functions as class methods.  So far the following Python
program seems to work just fine:

import liblo
msg = liblo.lo_message()
liblo.lo_message_add_string(msg, "test")
addr = liblo.lo_address("localhost", "8000")
addr.send_message("/test", msg)

The other major problem is lo_send().. apparently there are some
severe barriers to making bindings for vararg functions.  However, all
vararg functions in liblo also have their functionality exposed
through alternative interfaces like lo_send_message(), so I'm not too
worried.

Anyways, just thought I'd post about it in case it piques anyone's
interest.  If you are experienced with SWIG and want to help (I'm very
new to it), or have opinions on how the API should look in
higher-level languages, please feel free to make suggestions.


Steve