Re: Is GObject Introspection forgotten?

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Fri, 2013-09-13 at 11:55 +0400, Nikita Churaev wrote:
> There are still problems like: can't specify if a property can be NULL
> (eg. a NULL string), can't specify if an out parameter can return NULL,
> no support for reference-counted structures, can't specify length
> parameter for string arguments (eg. func (const char *test, int len))
> --- with no apparent prospect of getting fixed. Is GObject Introspection
> forgotten or are there some reasons why these problems are hard to fix

Yes.  A reason some of the problems are hard to fix is ones that require
binding updates.  For example, the utf8-with-length is certainly a valid
pattern, but were g-i to add it, a binding which isn't updated would
most likely just read memory off the end of the string (depending on how
it was implemented).

It's not impossible to add new features to g-i, but there are many
layers of coordination that need to happen.  Particularly for cases of
annotations which change the "IABI" (i.e. not the C ABI, but the ABI as
seen by bindings).

For reference counted structures, see
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678619 which would be great
to land next cycle.