Re: [GNOME VFS] gob inside gnome-vfs ...

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> > 	I can only believe that gob makes much sense, if you intend to
> > radically re-structure your API frequently - which I would view as a
> > pretty terrible idea (wrt. bin/API-compat :-). Is it possible to
> > consider choosing another sensible way ?
> 
> Well gob lets me think about what I'm designing rather than worry about
> what I'm typing. I can design the API to be easy to use rather than easy
> to implement because when I'm writing GObjects by hand I tend to worry
> about implementation complexity - because the more complex the
> implementation is the more mistakes I make.

Elaborating on this point... Look at the average number of objects used
in most C++ modules and compare them to even the most heavily
object-using C+GObject modules. Writing GObjects with C is a real
implementation impediment that affects the usage of objects in the real
world, even for those of us who are familiar with it. I seriously trade
off cost of implementing GObjects vs. "I know this is the better way to
do things" every time I think about using a GObject. I don't like to
make that tradeoff, and I consider it a serious design issue. Because
implementing objects in GOB is (imo) much lower cost, I don't end up
making that tradeoff. So in that sense I think GOBs contribution is
substantial.

On a side note, wrt to maintenance, GOB both helps and hurts. Jody has
pointed out that GOB has some detrimental effects on maintenance because
it adds one more layer in the dependency stack that could break. If
people are really worried about GOB changing and CVS HEAD being broken
for a certain amount of time before one of the maintainers (both of whom
prefer GOB in terms of maintainability) I'd be willing to disable
automatic running of gob at compile time (even for CVS checkouts) and
just run it manually myself whenever the .gob files change, and then
check the output files straight into CVS. I think its ugly, but it might
allay people's concerns that concerns with GOB's "maintainability" will
have a negative impact on them.

I would *much rather* use a language with object support than GOB (even,
say, C++), but since GnomeVFS is a platform library that's not really an
option.

-Seth