[Xapian-discuss] perl bindings

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 09:59:57AM -0000, Tim Brody wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Nov 2010 05:22:38 -0000, Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 10:39:47AM +0000, Tim Brody wrote:
>>> When are the XS-based Perl bindings going to be deprecated in favour of
>>> the SWIG bindings?
>>
>> A good question, but I'm not sure we have an answer yet.
>>
>> If we can make the SWIG bindings a perfect drop-in replacement, I think
>> we can just deprecate the XS ones at that point, and remove them once we
>> are pretty confident that we've shaken out any remaining issues.
>
> I'm unsure how you can test the above without writing a unit test for  
> every feature.

Well, that wouldn't be a bad thing to have, but actually methods which are
wrapped by SWIG automatically can be expected to work if similar methods
do (this is less true in XS where we have hand-coded wrappers for a lot
more methods).

So a more sensible goal would be that anything which is handled specially has
a test, and once 1.2.4 is out (soon, hopefully) we should encourage
Search::Xapian users to try the SWIG-based version and report issues.

> Otherwise, there are a couple of "FIXMEs" in regard to memory leaks in  
> SWIG? What else is there to do?

Hmm, I don't see any FIXMEs for memory leaks.

I think the main thing is that we're lacking wrappers for MatchDecider and
ExpandDecider which were wrapped before.

Also implicit string conversions don't work correctly in the SWIG generated
wrappers.

I've summarised the issues I'm aware of in a ticket:

http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/523

Cheers,
    Olly