Re: GTK+ brochure for FOSDEM

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2015 21:06:05 +0100
Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org> wrote:
> Uh, it's quite the contrary IMHO. If a developer chooses the C
> language and wants to write a GTK+ application, it's advised to write
> GObject classes to have a good code architecture. Look at gedit for
> instance, it's full of GObject classes. You create a subclass of
> GtkApplication, a subclass of GtkWindow for your main window,
> subclasses of GtkGrid or GtkBox for some other components that you
> have in your application, etc. Without GObject, you can write
> structs, allocate them and pass a pointer as the self argument, but
> GObject is much more powerful. It's interesting to create signals for
> example.

You are looking at it from the perspective of a GTK+ developer and not
an application developer.

Application developers not providing applications specifically for
the gnome stack almost never need to sub-class the library-provided GTK+
widgets.  For example, contrary to what you think, they do not sub-class
GtkWindow for their main window.  Instead they use the (generally)
perfectly adequate GTK+ container system to put things in GtkWindow
objects, or in library-provided sub-classes of GtkWindow.  If they want
to be particularly rigorous, they may provide a convenience factory
function for the purpose.  If that doesn't work they probably use
another toolkit, because OO with GObject is a pain for the application
developer writing in C (and as I say, normally completely unnecessary).
Nor for that matter would they normally sub-class GtkApplication: they
just connect to GApplication signals to customize behaviour.

Only in very specialized circumstances is derivation necessary in the
average application.

Chris