ANN: SIP v4.3 Released

[Phil Thompson]

Riverbank Computing is pleased to announce the release of SIP v4.3 available 
from http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/sip/.

SIP is a tool for generating Python modules that wrap C or C++ libraries.  It 
is similar to SWIG.  It is used to generate PyQt and PyKDE.  Full 
documentation is available at 
http://www.river-bank.demon.co.uk/docs/sip/sipref.html.

SIP is licensed under the Python License and runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux and 
MacOS/X.  SIP requires Python v2.3 or later (SIP v3.x is available to support 
earlier versions of Python).

This release includes the following changes:

- Python's cyclic garbage collector is fully supported
- support for mapping between Python and C++ exceptions
- support for __pos__ and __abs__
- the support for accessing C structure members has been greatly improved
- C structures can have constructors and destructors defined so that they can
  be made to behave more Pythonically.

Other features of SIP include:

- support for Python new-style classes
- generated modules are quick to import, even for large libraries
- support for Qt's signal/slot mechanism
- thread support
- the ability to re-implement C++ abstract and virtual methods in Python
- the ability to define Python classes that derive from abstract C++ classes
- the ability to spread a class hierarchy across multiple Python modules
- support for C++ namespaces
- support for C++ exceptions
- support for C++ operators
- an extensible build system written in Python that supports over 50
  platform/compiler combinations.