Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Sat, 2004-03-27 at 01:23, Mike Hearn wrote:
[with gratuitous snipping]
> As Soeren said it needn't be GType/GObject specific, a lighter weight
> abstraction over basic C types could be useful as well, if only for
> quickly strapping it onto existing code (C_ARRAY, C_STRUCT, C_STRING etc)

There aren't many GTK+ functions that take only basic C types. It
wouldn't be a very useful if it just told us that function
do_something() took 4 void* parameters and returned a void*.

Note that there already is a gtype-based system like this for signals,
which gtkmm, python, and probably others use, though gtkmm doesn't use
it at runtime.

> * Ability to bind objects from other languages -> GObject.
> Loading and reflecting a Python object into C should be an interesting
> project for somebody that wouldn't be too hard - the Python object model,
> with the exception of signals (which afaik is not a part of any native
> language OM) is a superset of GObject so it should not be too painful as
> long as some basic rules are followed. You could then write a Python class
> and run the automatic generator program on it to spit out a
> libmegaobject.so.0 file which contains the GObject skeletons for the
> class, along with code that implements the reflection interfaces.

I think that pyorbit might do something similar already, using the ORBit
typelibrary thing.

> * Not required but would be cool, ability to do all that automatically for
> objects from dynamic languages.
> 
> What I mean is there should be a generic:
> 
> GObject *python_get_gobject_from_class(PyObject *pyobj)
> 
> method, which:
> 
>   - reflects the python object and creates a new GType
>   - construct assembly thunks for the methods, init the signals
>     and so on, ie basically build the object at runtime
>   - delegates the reflection interfaces to a generic implementation
> 
> you can then do:
> 
> g_object_get_method(gobj, "some_foo_method") to get the function pointer,

Oh, and dbus has similar things, though I don't think it has a full type
system yet.

-- 
Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc murrayc com