[sword-devel] Pathway, SIL, GoBible and CrossWire

[Matthew Talbert]

> 3) Help with the C# bindings for SWORD. I know some people have talked
> about them in the past, but I don't know what state they might be in.
> Since Pathway is written in C#, it would be a great help to anyone
> writing a SWORD export path if they could access the engine bindings
> directly through C# rather than having to dump to a file and somehow
> invoke a copy of the utilities.  The people who are interested in
> using Pathway are incredibly illiterate when it comes to technology -
> most of them weren't even able to identify the differences between a
> smart phone and a "feature phone". So any export would need to write
> out an entire module, ready to be uploaded directly to a hosting
> location (or possibly a single ZIP archive which could be emailed to a
> technical member of SIL by the translator for hosting). Our SWIG
> bindings are OK and already in use for Python and Perl, and SWIG
> supports C#, so hopefully getting them working would not be a huge
> burden for someone. As the current pumpkin holder for SWIG I am
> willing to work with anyone who wants to tackle adding C# to the set.
> I don't work in C# at all, so I can't touch that myself.

SWIG and C# are not fun....Python is the most well-supported language,
there are quite a few things used in SWORD that are not currently
supported with SWIG and C# (multimaps, for example). The other option
is to write a wrapper in managed C++, which I think would probably be
better (though I know little about it myself). Work has already been
done on that, though not by the most popular person around.... After
looking, it looks like very little has actually been done, but still
it's a proof of concept:
http://bibleworkplace.sourceforge.net/sword2netdoc/sword2net_8cpp_source.html

Matthew