Introduction to the Eiffel Wrapper Generator

What is EWG?

EWG (Eiffel Wrapper Generator) is a tool that generates Eiffel wrapper classes for C libraries. It can be used to create libraries that bridge the gap between Eiffel and C. It aims to work for arbitrary ANSI C and with all common Eiffel compilers.

EWG is ideal for creating cross-platform, cross-eiffel-compiler and cross-c-compiler C library wrappers.

If you have questions that are not covered in this document, please email me at aleitner@raboof.at.

Diving into Ewg

Installation

Building the tools

Using the examples

How to create your own wrapper

Appendix

Current Features

• Parses pretty much all ANSI C, but also understands gcc and Visual C extensions

  Generates wrappers for:

  • Structs
  • Enums
  • Functions
  • Callbacks

• Works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X(code is very easily portable to new platforms)
• Works with SmartEiffel, ISE Eiffel and Visual Eiffel
• Includes framework to automate building libraries and applications that use EWG
• EWG comes with real life examples:
  • GTK 2
  • SDL
  • OpenGL
  • Berkeley DB

The GTK 2 example is actually on the edge of becoming usable for application developers.

Planned Features

• Support for macros
• Make mappings configurable (Names, Types, Contracts, ...)
• Make EWG easier to use
• Integrate with ePosix