使用 Homebrew 安装 swig

项目链接

• 主页
• 仓库

命令和别名

• ccache-swig
• swig

项目历史

SWIG began in July 1995 when Dave Beazley developed it at Los Alamos National Laboratory for scientific software that needed scripting interfaces. The official history says it was rewritten in C++ at the University of Utah in January 1996 and expanded beyond its original environment to Tcl, Perl, and Guile.

Version 1.0 arrived in September 1996 with Python support, followed by 1.1 in 1997. The long 1.3 development series began in 2000 and carried the project through a decade of incremental language and parser work before SWIG 2.0.0 was released in 2010.

Later major releases continued to track C++ and target-language evolution: 3.0.0 in 2014, 4.0.0 in 2019, 4.1.x in 2022, 4.2.x in 2023-2024, 4.3.x in 2024-2025, and 4.4.x in 2025.

采用历史

The SWIG homepage describes support for common scripting languages including JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and Ruby, plus non-scripting targets such as C#, D, Go, Java, Lua, OCaml, Octave, Scilab, R, and Guile. That breadth made it a general-purpose bridge for C and C++ libraries rather than a single-language extension tool.

The documentation page lists papers and tutorials from the 1996-1998 period and later training material, reflecting early adoption in Tcl, Python, Perl, scientific computing, and systems integration communities.

The input package facts show SWIG in many package managers, including apk, Homebrew, Chocolatey, Debian, DNF, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, Scoop, Ubuntu, winget, and zypper. That distribution footprint fits its role as a cross-platform tool needed by both developers and downstream package builds.

使用方式

SWIG is commonly used to parse C or C++ declarations and generate wrapper or glue code so higher-level languages can call native libraries. It is also used for prototyping, testing, embedding interpreters, and exporting parse information.

In package builds, SWIG often appears as a build-time dependency for projects that ship generated bindings for Python, Java, Ruby, Perl, Tcl, R, Octave, or other target languages.

为什么软件包爱好者会关心

SWIG is package-nerd significant because it is part compiler, part portability layer, and part historical artifact of scripting-language extension culture. It lets a C or C++ library become packages in multiple language ecosystems without hand-writing every binding layer.

Its long release history also matters operationally: old software may require old SWIG behavior, while new packages need modern C++, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Go, or Java support. Distribution maintainers therefore care about which SWIG version is installed and when generated files are regenerated.

时间线

• 1995: SWIG developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• 1996: First alpha release and version 1.0 with Python support.
• 1997: Version 1.1 released.
• 2000: SWIG 1.3 alpha series begins.
• 2010: SWIG 2.0.0 released.
• 2014: SWIG 3.0.0 released.
• 2019: SWIG 4.0.0 released.
• 2022: SWIG 4.1.0 and 4.1.1 released.
• 2024: SWIG 4.2.x and 4.3.0 released.
• 2025: SWIG 4.3.1, 4.4.0, and 4.4.1 released.

Related projects

• Related technologies include Python extension modules, Perl XS, JNI, CFFI/ctypes-style foreign function interfaces, CORBA/IDL-style interface compilers, and package build systems that generate language bindings from C and C++ headers.

来源

• https://www.swig.org/
• https://www.swig.org/compat.html
• https://www.swig.org/doc.html
• https://www.swig.org/history.html
• input.source_facts.package-manager