Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, 2004-03-27 at 09:37, Christian Glodt wrote:
> 
> To keep this short, here's what I think would be nice:
> 
> - Add the necessary metadata to the sources as code annotations
>   (in gtkdoc-like comments).
> 
> - Hack up gtkdoc to parse these. Have it generate one .def-file
>   in a common format for all bindings to use.
> 
> - Have the hacked gtkdoc generate a kind of "type library" from
>   the sources.
> 
> - Add type library support to gobject, such that for any gobject-
>   based type, the type library can be found, loaded and used
>   at run-time. Alternatively put this support into another library
>   that can be used by language runtimes and virtual machines.
> 
> In the end this would be a way to enable java-like introspection
> on gobject based types, usable from C and thus any language.
> 
> By keeping the metadata within the source code, maintenance would
> be much simplified (can't stress this enough).

Agree - this is precisely what Qt's "moc" does, btw. ;-)

I've been advocating this approach on the D-BUS mailing list.

Havoc