Perhaps the best thing about CLIF is that it never, ever, parses any C++ by hand [0]. It always uses a state-of-the-art, fully-industrial-strength, well-supported compiler: Clang. And it can be updated in lockstep with Clang near trivially.
[0] Actually, there is one tiny exception: CLIF occasionally separates a C++ qualified name on the scope-resolution operator "::".
I'm cautiously excited. The problem with C++ is there's just so many good frameworks but you can't use them without creating more C++.
SWIG should be called WIG. And anyway, I can't see it surviving modern C++.
As long as I'm ranting, what is modern C++ but a bunch of new languages that are incompatible with C++, each other, and everything else? Forgive me if I'm wrong but this seems like a terrible idea.
Modern C++ means picking up the ideas from Alexandrescu, avoiding unsafe C style programming unless profiler tells otherwise and using the higher level features from C++ for writing nice, usable, safe libraries.
Many of the idioms actually already possible back in the C++ARM days, before C++98 was a thing, but spoiled by C refugees.
Maybe I got my terminology wrong. I'm talking about the wave of new standards. I feel like they're a bunch of new languages which are improvements over C++ but not backwards compatible with C++. Every problem you have interoperating two different languages you have between these different C++es but worse because there aren't tools like SWIG to help you.
You can say the same about any programming language that enjoys wide market adoption, except maybe for C that still thinks computers are like PDP-11's, with C99 and C11 being very tiny evolutions with little regard to improve the overall productivity.
Even Fortran and Cobol(!) have evolved more than C.
Not to say SWIG isn't an amazing effort, but it's a whole C++ compiler maintained by a very small team.
+ I already put my time in at the gcc salt mines so no, I didn't try doing this myself.