swig Getting started with swig Hello World

Example

A minimal example of using SWIG.

HelloWorld.i, the SWIG interface file

%module helloworld    //the name of the module SWIG will create
%{                    //code inside %{...%} gets inserted into the wrapper file
#include "myheader.h" //helloworld_wrap.cxx includes this header
%}

%include "myheader.h"   //include the header for SWIG to parse

Then, in the command line

swig -c++ -java HelloWorld.i

which means we are wrapping C++ (as opposed to C) with Java as the target language as specified by HelloWorld.i. This will produce a C++ file, helloworld_wrap.cxx, which has the wrapper code. This file should be compiled and linked against whatever code the wrapper is supposed to interface with (e.g., a static library) to produce a shared library. With some languages, as with Java in our example, additional code will be generated - in our case, there will be at least one Java class file.