|  | T1am Tcl Extension Building and SWIG David M. Beazley, University of Utah and Gerald W. Lester, Computerized Processes Unlimited, Inc. Who should attend: Developers involved in building Tcl/Tk interfaces to C/C++ applications or building compiled extensions to Tcl, who need useful information about building extensions to Tcl 8.0 as well as tools for automating the extension-building process. Participants should be familiar with C, but no prior experience with Tcl extension building is required. Participants will explore several approaches to adding new commands and creating new shells in Tcl using C. The instructors will cover returning results and conversion functions. This tutorial will demonstrate the extensibility of Tcl and its strength as an embedded language. Topics include:
| Accessing Tcl variables
| Mapping Tcl variables to C variables
| Tracing Tcl variables
| Executing Tcl commands from C
| Embedding into an application
| Creating new Tcl/Tk shells vs. dynamic loading of extensions
| Action vs. object commands
| Compiling and building the Sybtcl/Oratcl extensions
The use of SWIG, a tool for automatically generating Tcl interfaces to C/C++ programs, will also be described. While the use of SWIG will be discussed, many of the topics also apply to other automated Tcl extension building tools. Topics include:
| Building Tcl interfaces to C libraries
| Working with objects and C++
| Exception handling
| Compilation and linking issues
| Interface building strategies, pitfalls, and tricks
Dave Beazley is the developer of SWIG, a freely available tool for building Tcl, Perl,and Python interfaces to C/C++ applications. He has worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and published a variety of articles on the use of scripting environments with high-performance scientific and engineering applications. He is a PhD Candidate at the University of Utah and will be joining the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science.

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