Easing language bindings (was Re: GtkPlot widget)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

To solve the language binding problem once and for all what we need is a
tool that parses the C headers and can build bindings from them. Otherwise
it will always take forever to sync the bindings with the C library, and
stuff like this will cause pain.

The only bindings author to use this approach so far is Manuel with his
Haskell bindings. He has a cool tool that even autogenerates the functions
to access struct members. That tool is written in Haskell - maybe not a
big deal since only the binding maintainers would have to install the
Haskell compiler - but Perl is likely more convenient and Owen points out
that the gtk-doc codebase is a good place to start writing a Perl version.
In any case Manuel has a paper about his approach on his web site that
ought to be interesting.

If all the language binding authors worked together you could probably
have some code to extract all the type and function information from
GTK/Gnome in a fairly short period of time; then writing a binding is just
a matter of walking these data structures and spitting out code in the
proper language, and maybe adding some special cases.

Havoc