Re: Cooperating on .defs API specifications

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 31/03/2004 3:52 AM, Andreas Rottmann wrote:

> Why not have .defs files, and generate the binary info from them? The
> .defs files are already there, and they contain more information than
> the headers do (well, comment parsing might change that, but you could
> create comments from the .defs files :)). Just an idea...
>  
For simple cases, the defs files contain enough information.  For the 
more complex cases, they lack some information that would be needed for 
full introspection.  Some examples are:

   * what types do (GList *) arguments and return values hold?  How
     should a binding release a (GList *) return value? (in various
     parts of GTK and Gnome, the answer is "free all members then the
     list", "free the list" and "do nothing")
   * Some functions take an array and a length arguments.  It would be
     good to link these together (for most languages, we should be able
     to omit the length arguments, since their list/array types know
     their length).
   * Is an (int *) argument an array of ints being passed in, an array
     of ints that will be modified (inout), or a pointer to a single
     int being used as an out argument?

James.

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