Minutes 111706

Minutes from Gaetan email

This text for the minutes was taken from Gaetan's email following the tcon

http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/2006-November/008718.html

Summary

The current wrapping system:

• work on linux and windows with tcl, python and java
• known to have problems on mac os (java, python) and solaris (java)
• the problems detailed in the WrapITK article, including the small coverage, and inconsistency in wrapped types

WrapITK:

• 66% of the filters wrapped
• tcl, python, java
• python typemaps, to be able to use python types rather than simple itk objects, like FixedArray, Index, Size, ...
• no typemaps for tcl and java
• lacks some custom classes from the previous wrapping system in java and tcl
• tested on linux, mac os, and recently, solaris
• still lots of problems with windows (especially with java), even if some users have reported using it on that plateform (msvc 7.1 only I think)

What will be better with swig:

• a lot easier to customize
• build with python 2.5
• should help to fix problems with very long file names
• may help to fix build caused by too big generated c++ files
• no need to maintain a branch of swig

WrapITK with swig status:

• swig is still not able to read ITK headers - they still need to be read by gccxml. The output of gccxml is converted to a swig interface with igenerator.py
• python only
• made on mac os
• all currently wrapped itk classes builds with swig
• no customization from the current wrapitk, like typemaps
• but some other customizations, like vector support
• no cmake configurations support
• based on cableidx and pygccxml, so need python to build
• problems with cmake dependencies
• don't group the groups in a few shared modules
• no template with dict interface
• require pygccxml cvs and swig cvs because some bugs have been fixed while working on wrapping ITK with swig
• only a few changes have been made (to respect the wrapping order imposed by swig) in the WrapITK/Modules directory
• roughly, igenerator.py have took about 2 days of work, modifying WrapITK have took 1 day. The bugs above, and a misunderstanding of pygccxml query interface took me one more day

What need to be done (* mark for what I need help), in the order I think it should be done:

• fix the cmake dependencies *
• add the customizations
  • basic types like std::string, std::exception, ...
  • typemaps currently in WrapITK
  • PyCommand, PyImageToImageFilter
• fix the dict interface for the templates

(at that point, the current python tests should all pass on unix-like systems)

• support cmake configurations
• make it work on all the systems, and submit daily tests for all those systems on the dashboard *
• add support for java (*?)
• add support for tcl and the customizations from the current wrapper (TkImageViewer2D, TclCommand, ...) *
• more python customizations: __getitem__(), __len__(), __str__(), ... like in the current optional patch
• recode igenerator.py in c++ to no more use pygccxml (igenerator.py is attached for the ones who want to have an idea of the work to do) *

(the following items are too be done later)

• better filter coverage *
• support more languages
• ...

What still remain to decide:

• when switch to swig (I think it's clear that the switch is a good thing)
• who can/want to work on the the items marked with a "*" in the "What need to be done" section above (any help is welcome for the other items too :-)
• how to proceed:
  • fix WrapITK with cableswig on windows, or switch first to swig, and make sure it builds on windows after that
  • create a new cvs branch or a new cvs check out