SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator) is a free ).
There are two main purposes of embedding a scripting engine into an existing C/C++ program:
The program can then be customized much more quickly, using the scripting language rather than C/C++. The scripting engine may even be exposed to the end user, so that they can automate common tasks by writing scripts.
Even if the final product is not to contain the scripting engine, it may nevertheless be quite useful to write testing scripts.
There are a very wide variety of reasons to create dynamic libraries that can be loaded into existing interpreters, including:
Provide access to a C/C++ library (computer science) which has no equivalent in the scripting language.
Write the whole program in the scripting language, and after performance analysis, rewrite performance critical code in C or C++.
SWIG is written in C and C++ and has been publicly available since February 1996. The initial author and main developer is Dave Beazley, now at the University of Chicago. He is supported by an active group of volunteers. SWIG has been released under a BSD license, meaning it can be used, copied, modified and redistributed freely, for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
=External links=
[http://www.swig.org/ Project home page]
[http://www.signal6.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl SwigWiki] - Wiki containing information about using SWIG.