Swig vs C#

I spent some time recently evaluating SWIG . It's a nice way to expose your C or C++ interfaces to perl or python (and possibly other languages) -- although it has some perfectly understandable limitation on what types you can use. These limitations are surmountable by writing some helper functions.

Unfortunately what the customer wanted was to access the interface "from .NET" (which I translated to: from C#. )

Swig has a -csharp option [Digression: Swig's argument are positional flags!!!!. That is "swig -csharp -c++ " doesnt work! You have to say swig -c++ -csharp. Not necessarily a confidence builder.] Unfortunately the entire documentation for the -csharp option consists of about 20 lines in the manual and these lines are not terribly helpful since they show how to access global C variables using Mono's version of C#.

"Google swig csharp" or "google swig c#" didn't produce anything more helpful. (actually this blog may now show up in that search and I've already explained more than any of the other hits did (chuckle))

There's a SWIG wiki page, but when I rummaged around on it the only relevant thing I found was a FAQ (with no answer) that turned out to be pretty useless.

Bottom line, I think it'll be easier to write a managed C++ bridge layer to expose the C++ interfaces to the .NET world. We'll see (if I ever get back to this issue.)