On Sat, Oct 03, 2009 at 01:50:02PM +0300, Xan Lopez wrote: > On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 1:30 PM, Magnus Therning <magnus therning org> wrote: > > On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 06:00:07PM +0200, Wouter Bolsterlee wrote: > >> Op vrijdag 25-09-2009 om 22:11 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Magnus > >> Therning: > >> > Does anyone out there have a .vapi for epiphany's extension API? > >> > > >> > I'm particularly interested in the bookmark manipulation API. > >> > >> Afaik the idea is to have at least Seed extensions for Epiphany. Python > >> support has been dropped, and it won't come back. I'm not sure about > >> Vala, even though there were plans for it: > >> > >> http://uwstopia.nl/blog/2008/07/vala-bindings-for-epiphany-extensions > >> > >> But then, I think Seed extensions are designed fill exactly the same > >> gap, so I'm not sure what the added value of Vala extensions is. > > > > Epiphany has always supported extensions written in C. Basically Vala would > > offer a way of writing C extensions in a language that arguably is much nicer > > to work with :-) > > > > My experience with trying to translate a Python extension to Seed was that it > > wasn't ready for proper use yet: > > > > - Javascript doesn't include many of the handy types that is in Python, > > especially dictionaries (maps) and sets. Vala has Gee. > > Objects in JavaScript are dictionaries (I mean, even the syntax is the > same...), and I'm sure there's plenty of implementations of data structures > like Python sets around. No, they are "dictionary-like", not proper dictionaries. For instance keys can only be strings or numbers. I'm sure there are implementations of sets around for JavaScript. But that's just the point, Seed *doesn't come with one*, instead I have to look around for an implementation to use. Then I have to track any upstream changes. It's just not the kind of situation I expect from an extension language. I'm sure this is going to change at some point, after all Seed is used in other parts in Gnome too. > > - The GNOME libraries are largely written in C, and even though introspection > > makes Seed bindings trivial the API's are distinctly non-object orientated. > > Vala's .vapi files manage to offer a much improved API. > > How are Seed bindings not object orientated? Not to say that you can't > improve things by doing manual fixing of the automated bindings, as usual, > but I'm not sure what you mean here. Well, first of all, JavaScript's variant of object orientation has a distinctive functional feel to me, but beyond that you are right, my comment was overly harsh. Seed bindings are as object-orientated as GTK+/GNOME is, which means it's somewhat limited by its C roots, but offers a good base to build more idiomatic bindings for different object systems. I haven't found any idiomatic bindings for JavaScript/Seed yet though. /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe
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