xraylib 5.0.0: proposed changes

[tschoonj]

Dear xraylib users,

I propose that the next major version (5.0.0) of xraylib will see the following major changes:

• The removal of all deprecated API
• The removal of the GNU Autotools based build system, making meson the only supported buildsystem
• The removal of the more exotic language bindings:
  • Ruby
  • Lua
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • IDL (hasn't been maintained for some time)
  • C#/.NET (I am unable to develop or compile these myself)
  • Pascal/Delphi

The main driver behind these changes are the simplification of the codebase that comes with it, resulting in less work for me to keep it all working. GNU Autotools also barely sees any development nowadays and I consider meson to be a much nicer and faster buildsystem, that works on all platforms.

I understand that this may affect some of you, so please let me know it if it does and we can discuss possible solutions.

There is no timeline for the 5.0.0 release at the moment, so it may take many months or years before I get around to do this.

[jenbroross]

I would strongly hope that bindings to C#/.NET could be preserved.

[fergarciacode]

I also hope that bindings to C#/.NET could be preserved, even improved. I tried to use the xraylib.dll inside Unity but was not able to succed, because the .dll compilation is static I believe, I ended up using the pyhton binding of unity (python.dll), and installed xraylib on the python environment called by this binding, which works well.

As well, if it is possible to suggest changes and inclusions, I think a Julia binding could be a valuable addition. Given Julia’s C interop and scientific focus, wrapping xraylib might be relatively straightforward.

Thanks