RE: Next SWIG release

At 11:00 AM 1/28/03 +0100, Koester Uwe (TPM/DM) wrote:
> isn't there anyone else having trouble with the size of the generated files
> (on windows for file size larger than 65536 lines no more debugging
> information is generated)? I would appreciate to be able to debug again...
> So it would be nice to divide the output to several parts!

Well, not that I'm not sympathetic (I've run into the problem myself), but 
the problem is, how is SWIG supposed to know where to sensibly split the thing?
Suppose that at the beginning of your interface file you have:

%{
#include "foo.h"
#include "bar.h"

void someFunction(Foo& f) {
    /* used in the SWIG interface to support some
       reorganization of the Foo class interface so
       that it is more Pythonic/Rubyesque/whatever */
    ...
}

SOME_OBSCURE_MACRO(Foo)
%}

and then you merrily go along declaring a few scores of classes.

How do you split that?
The two #include directives might be put in each part---that might be 
redundant but safe. The function definition should be put in one part only, 
or the linker will complain for the duplicate definition. But the other 
parts might need the declaration, so the latter should be extracted and 
duplicated.
I suppose it might be done (with quite some effort) but SWIG is not 
supposed to be that smart. And what about the macro (probably defined in 
one of the #included files, which SWIG doesn't parse)? Is it defining a 
function or what? Would it be safe to copy it in each part or not? This 
defeats all heuristics.

Also, if I may be so bold, the sheer size of your wrappers suggests that 
you consider splitting your module in different sub-modules instead. This 
is already possible and documented, might be useful for your users too as 
the logical structure of the module would become clearer, and would 
effectively solve the 2^16 lines problem.

Bye,
        Luigi

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