Re: Vala bindings for epiphany?

[Xan Lopez <xan gnome org>]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 1:30 PM, Magnus Therning <magnus therning org> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 06:00:07PM +0200, Wouter Bolsterlee wrote:
>> Op vrijdag 25-09-2009 om 22:11 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Magnus
>> Therning:
>> > Does anyone out there have a .vapi for epiphany's extension API?
>> >
>> > I'm particularly interested in the bookmark manipulation API.
>>
>> Afaik the idea is to have at least Seed extensions for Epiphany. Python
>> support has been dropped, and it won't come back. I'm not sure about
>> Vala, even though there were plans for it:
>>
>>   http://uwstopia.nl/blog/2008/07/vala-bindings-for-epiphany-extensions
>>
>> But then, I think Seed extensions are designed fill exactly the same
>> gap, so I'm not sure what the added value of Vala extensions is.
>
> Epiphany has always supported  extensions written in C.  Basically Vala would
> offer a way of writing C extensions in a language that arguably is much nicer
> to work with :-)
>
> My experience with trying to translate a Python extension to Seed was that it
> wasn't ready for proper use yet:
>
>  - Javascript doesn't include many of the handy types that is in Python,
>   especially dictionaries (maps) and sets.  Vala has Gee.

Objects in JavaScript are dictionaries (I mean, even the syntax is the
same...), and I'm sure there's plenty of implementations of data
structures like Python sets around.

>
>  - The GNOME libraries are largely written in C, and even though introspection
>   makes Seed bindings trivial the API's are distinctly non-object orientated.
>   Vala's .vapi files manage to offer a much improved API.

How are Seed bindings not object orientated? Not to say that you can't
improve things by doing manual fixing of the automated bindings, as
usual, but I'm not sure what you mean here.

>
> In short, I've found Vala vastly more pleasant to work with for writing
> Epiphany extensions compared to Seed.
>
> /M
>
> --
> Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
> magnus＠therning．org          Jabber: magnus＠therning．org
> http://therning.org/magnus         identi.ca|twitter: magthe
>
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