Re: gtk2 news

[Scott Smith <ssmith watson wustl edu>]

> sounds like a plan!
>
> here are a couple of things i noticed from writing a rather large XS
> project which needed to interface to the original GtkPerl ------ you
> might want to watch out for these if you haven't considered them already:
>
> - memory leaks are very easy to create, especially when passing a perl
> list as args to a callback, or in general any callback data.  in most
> places, the fix for these leaks was to hand-code the XS interface for
> that function.

Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.

> - the type system used a cache to speed up type lookups.  will such
> caching be necessary with GObject as opposed to GtkObject?
>
> - in several points of the API, turning the existing function names into
> sensible perl OO syntax required some special handling ---- especially
> with functions which modified arguments.  in the old code these were
> hand-coded to have them pass back the multiple return values as a list,
> in the perl-ish style.  are you planning to have a perl-ish interface to
> the generated code, or keep it C-ish?  how will you determine which ones
> are return values?

My initial angle was to wrap the C functions at a very low level, and
have a perl-ish wrapper figure out exactly how to call the
c-function-wrapper created by XS, and exactly how to make the results
perl-ish.  It may be better for speed to move some of those into the XS
layer.

> not meaning to cast aspersions, i'm honestly trying to help.  if you
> need/want coding help, gimme a holler.

I'll hopefully have the code I have so-far up tonight.

Scott