Version 4.6

[cfis]

@jasonroelofs I'm planning on creating a new Rice release, 4.6, in the next few weeks. It has a bunch more changes that I needed to successfully wrap OpenCV. Once again, it is not fully backwards compatible with the previous version (define_methods changed for stl classes, see below):

• Introduce new Buffer class to handle C style array arguments of fundamental types or C++ classes - both reading and writing. This change also enables support of C style output parameters (references or pointers). It did require introducing an optional rice_init function.

• Rewrite keyword arguments and default value handling. Previously if a keyword argument was skipped, even if it had a default value, Rice would crash. As part of this handling of default values moved to NativeFunction from FromRuby. This centralizes the code and removes a lot of boilerplate.

• Make Rice somewhat const aware. Rice now stores whether a wrapped C++ object is constant or not. Second, when calling a C++ method the method overloading code will not send a const value to a non-const parameter. It will send a non-const value to a const parameter, but prefers non-const to non-const or const to const. Note const checking is only applied for method overloads.

• Improve error messages when Rice cannot determine what overloaded method to call.

• Track unbound Data_Type instance with a std::vector instead of sett::set because the static member set causes crashes on clang and g++ compiled binaries at startup (msvc is fine).

• Make Enums more useful by adding coerce method to enable stringing together bitwise operators - for example Season::Winter | Season::Spring | Season::Summer.

• Add Return#setArray and #isArray to allow users to specify that a returned pointer is actually a C array.

• Add Rice version macros

• Include Rice::VERSION in published gem

STL updates:

• Update std::vector to expose more constructors and support cloning via the copy constructor

• Update STL define methods (define_vector, define_set, etc) to align with STL. The STL has methods like make_shared while Rice was doing define_shared<std::shared_ptr>. Rice has now switched to define_shared. Note this is not a backwards compatible change, but easy to adopt.

• Add compile time checks to see if wrapper code is using STL classes (vectors, sets) but has not included rice/stl.hpp. Not including rice/stl.hpp results in strange, hard to track down bugs.

• Add multimap support

• Add support for std::set

• Update shared_ptr implementation to work better with fundamental types.

• Fix double free error caused by releasing unique_ptr's too late. Also check for Qnil values and returning null pointers.

• Revamp Wrapper class, split smart_ptr into unique_ptr and shared_ptr.

• Move autogenerated Stl classes from Rice::Std module to just Std:: which more naturally maps to C++ and is more consistent with wrapping other C++ libraries. For example, OpenCv classes are under the Cv namespace to match the C++ library.

• Add support for std::complex passed by reference.

[jasonroelofs]

Awesome, yeah this all looks good. Is there anything you need from me?

[cfis]

I'm good - just wanted to provide a heads up.

[cfis]

Ok this is complete.