ANN: SIP v4.4 Released

[Phil Thompson]

Riverbank Computing is pleased to announce the release of SIP v4.4 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.riverbankcomputing.com/Docs/sip4/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:

- support for class and mapped type templates
- support for global operators
- support for signed char, long long and unsigned long long types
- support for Python's buffer interface
- support for ellipsis in function arguments
- support for __hash__
- namespaces can now be split across Python modules.

Other features of SIP include:

- extension modules are implemented as a single binary .pyd or .so file (no
  Python stubs)
- 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.

Phil