Re: [OT] Re: Third draft (was Re: defs files)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Guillaume Laurent <glaurent@worldnet.fr> writes: 
> It's when we *can't* use our auto-generation mechanisms that I'm
> getting pissed, hence my request for more "binding friendly" headers,
> and more consistency in the use of the OO framework. 10% of the API we
> bind is taking 90% of our time.
> 
> Note that gtk+ is by far much easier than Gnome to wrap, though :-).
> 

The solution here is to gradually fix GTK and GNOME over time, while
minimizing API breakage and keeping the API fairly nice in plain
C. There is really no other way to approach the problem. A "thick"
wrapper like Gtk-- will always involve some manually-written code, so
if it pisses you off that much you should probably just give up :-)

GTK was not originally designed purely for language bindings and can't
be redesigned purely for that now. You have to understand that there
are tradeoffs. Something that is good for Gtk-- may be bad for other
reasons, including niceness of the C API, code complexity, backward
compatibility, code maintainability, memory/speed issues, etc., etc.

If you can understand that then you can work on productive
enhancements to the GTK and GNOME code and Gtk-- can get easier over
time. In particular now would be a good time to contribute patches to
the HEAD branch of gnome-libs. After we freeze those libs it will be a
terrible time to contribute such patches and they will not get
in. However I would very much like to see necessary changes for
language bindings while we are in development mode.

Havoc