Re: Widget descriptors as unions

[Florian Pelz <pelzflorian pelzflorian de>]

On 08/29/2015 11:49 AM, Jean-Marie Delapierre wrote:
> What I hope if the advantage of detecting more bugs at compilation time
> is agreed by the GTK+ community is that the union type declarations
> would be just included in the standard header files, allowing the
> programmers to use any coding style they want.

Making suggestions for improvements is good and it's good that there can
be a discussion about it. However, I don't think your suggestion is the
right way to go. The advantage of your suggestion would be better
warnings, but if we had a good static code analysis tool (as Emmanuele
said) we could also get better warnings and they could be worded even
clearer. It is also less invasive because it could be used by the text
editor with which the code is written (e.g. GNOME Builder) instead of
the build system.

(Even though your suggestion apparently was not entirely clear back then
-- you do not want to replace the type system but only add a new way to
do conversions --, some of the points made by Emmanuele are still valid.)