Making the pointer handling code simpler is proving rather involved. PyOpenGL is written (not by me, this is all Tarn's code) as a set of macros that expand 4 or 5 levels deep even before it gets to SWIG, which is essentially an interlocking set of macro expansions. The problem is that the pointer-handling basically requires a completely new mechanism for handling each glSetXPointer call.

That would be fine, but it requires breaking out the (hairy) SWIG macros into versions which are for use with pointers that are intended to be "held" by PyOpenGL and those which are local to the function call. That makes things kind of messy with the current layout.

Basically the idea is to write something like this: