Typelib: a C++ type and value introspection library

1.1

Typelib is a C++ library which allows for introspection on data types and data values. Its value model is based on the C type model. The library allows to load definition from various type description files (including plain C), build types programmatically, create and manipulate values from these types.

The following import/export plugins are available:

import plain C plus C++-compatible namespace support
import/export into Typelib's own XML format
export IDL files (CORBA definition language)

A binding to the Ruby language is provided, which allows to very easily interface a dynamic library from within Ruby code. This Ruby binding is based on the dyncall library, whose full source code is provided in this release.

Typelib has been written by Sylvain Joyeux <sylvain.joyeux@m4x.org>

This software is provided under the CeCILL B License, which gives comparable terms of use than the BSD license. See LICENSE.txt or LICENSE.fr.txt provided with the source code for the full license texts.

These pages document only the C++ part of the library. The Ruby bindings documentation is available here.

Installation

Getting the source code

Releases are available on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/typelib/. You can access this project page from anywhere in the documentation by clicking on the SourceForge.net logo at the bottom of documentation pages.

The development repository is managed by git and is (for now) publicly available in GitHub:

  git clone git://github.com/doudou/typelib.git

(see this page for more information)

Building and installing the C++ library

The C++ library depends on the following:

the boost library, including boost/filesystem
utilmm (utilmm.sf.net)
the antlr parser generator
cmake and pkg-config
doxygen for the documentation (optional)
libxml2

When all these dependencies are installed, run

    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake ..
    make
    make doc # to build the documentation, only if doxygen is available

and as root,

    make install

Alternatively, you can add the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=path/to/the/installation/target option to cmake to install the files in a custom directory

Building and installing Ruby bindings

The installation of the Ruby bindings require the following: the ruby interpreter version 1.8 and the associated development files. Under Debian, these are named ruby1.8 and libruby1.8-dev testrb for the test suite rdoc for generating the documentation (optional)

At runtime, the bindings require the following: utilrb, which is best downloaded as a gem. See http://www.rubygems.org for information about the RubyGems system. This system can be installed by the rubygems package on Debian.

When you have installed rubygems, run gem install utilrb

You may have to run it as root if RubyGems is installed globally (this is the case for Debian's rubygems package)

You can also find the sources at git clone git://github.com/doudou/util-rb.git read the INSTALL.txt file