Re: Is GObject Introspection forgotten?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

the proper mailing list for gobject-introspection is gtk-devel-list gnome org 

On 13 September 2013 08:55, Nikita Churaev <lamefun x0r gmail com> wrote:
> There are still problems like: can't specify if a property can be NULL
> (eg. a NULL string), can't specify if an out parameter can return NULL,
> no support for reference-counted structures, can't specify length
> parameter for string arguments (eg. func (const char *test, int len))
> --- with no apparent prospect of getting fixed. Is GObject Introspection
> forgotten or are there some reasons why these problems are hard to fix
> or can't be fixed?

gobject-introspection needs developers; people working on it are
usually also working on language bindings, or, in the case of Colin,
working on build and deployment systems.

some of those issues are tracked in Bugzilla:

- Bug 660879 - Add support for using (allow-none) on return values
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660879

- Bug 694735 - giscanner: give error when utf8 strings are annotated
with length argument
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=694735

I honestly have no idea about "support for reference-counted
structures": you can either use a boxed type, or describe a new
fundamental GTypeInstance. if you mean "support for random C
structures with random C refcounting semantics", I'd just like to
point out that the project is called "gobject-introspection" —
operative keyword being "gobject". if you want to introspect random C
API then you'll need a lot of help from the compiler, and it's a
pretty big effort. introspecting GNOME libraries is already hard
enough, even if they conform to best practises.

I've been going through the Bugzilla 'introspection' component in
order to do some triage, lately; it still has 245 bugs open, but I'm
sure a bunch of those can be closed, or at least updated to check if
they are still relevant.

help is sorely needed, both in terms of triaging, documentation, and
development.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/