Re: GLib plans for next cycle

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 5:16 PM, Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca> wrote:
>
> All of it except the source API changes is dependent on the libgthread
> merge.

I see that now - makes sense.

> This was a separate branch, actually, but I just nuked it to reduce the
> noise of all the branches I've been pushing.  I'll split it back out and
> push it again.

Great, thanks!  I should also mention I looked briefly through the
source stuff and it looked really nice - you have good ideas here and
the patches are pretty clean.

> Everything in this email and on the branch is for the start of next
> cycle.

Yeah, I more meant that ideally the source stuff lands after.

> I actually think the opposite.  I'd prefer if we could enable super-slow
> debug mode with an environment variable.  It would make it way easier to
> get debugging information out of users who are experiencing a problem
> and don't want to rebuild their system glib or their application.

If the cost is small, I agree environment variables are fine.  But the
cost is not always small even to just have the code around (think
about reference count tracking).

> Another option is to use library load constructors to run the
> initialisation we need to do.  That's certainly possible on Windows
> systems and anything using GCC.  I'm not sure if it's possible to do it
> in a portable way from pure C, though.

This might be the way to go if we can make it cheap.