[weekly report] Week 2: Python - GObject-Introspection

[Simon van der Linden <simon vanderlinden agora eu org>]

Hey folks,

In a few bullets, here is what happened last week on my side:
* Tomeu's code, including a partial structures support, was merged into
PyBank.
* I moved PyBank into PyGObject. The module is now called girepository.
If you have gobject-introspection in your pkg-config path, it'll be
built.
* I rewrote the invocation checks in C, and I measured a speedup of
approx. 5 on average over 100000 calls to a function with a few
arguments (fundamental types).
* I fixed various things, wrote some more unit tests, ...
* I spent some time thinking about how to automate the conversion of
existing Python apps to introspection. Tomeu wrote a set of regexes for
Sugar, and I experimented an automatic generation of thoses regexes from
introspection data; not very successful. The Python developers wrote
lib2to3 to convert Python 2.x code to 3.0. That is probably more
powerful than the regex, but I'm not sure we could go very far since
Python is loosely typed.

I feel I'm getting more productive.

However, this week-end, I ran into some problems with
GObject-Introspection, and that made me discover a bug:

% python -c "import girepository, Everything; o =
EveryThing.TestObj('foo')"
% python -c "import girepository, GObject, Everything; o =
EveryThing.TestObj('foo')"
Segmentation Fault
%

The back trace is not very helpful, it segfaults in Python's garbage
collector. I have absolutely no idea where it comes from, but if you
feel like a hero, and you can get me some information, I won't
refuse. ;-)

That being said, I wish you all a happy hack week, and see you soon!

-- 
Simon van der Linden