Type system query.

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

	I use the Gtk type system in gb to handle all of my type
problems, from base types through user defined type through classes
and it works very nicely thank you. However, I'm starting to think
that it may not fit all my needs forever; some problems I am
considering are:

	* public / module private types

	* ability to de-register types

	* multiple concurrent type contexts

	The latter is rather important already in eg. gnumeric in
different spreadsheets we can have separate gb execution contexts in
the same process that mustn't share type data but currently do.

	These lead me to believe that either I need to re-implement
a more generic type system based on the Gtk code; or start at the
beggining, or hope that somehow GType fixes this.

	So; I looked at GType and there are a lot of nice things there
that I want; however it is clearly still tied to a single type
context, however there is no particularly good reason for this that I
can see. If only in theory it should be possible to provide the same
API with the real guts of the type system exposed genericly relatively
easily.

	I hope this criticism is remotely useful / constructive, since
I have no time to address these problems before the immenant freeze.
Also without thinking I have no particularly clever ideas on how to
address the public / private issues without a fair lot of
modification. Perhaps in Gtk+ 3.0 ...

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot