Re: why do constructors return GtkWidget?

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 13:32 +0200, Emmanuel Touzery wrote:
>      It's annoying for me because I find that putting the real types
> in 
> my code makes it easier to follow (rather than everything being a 
> GtkWidget*), but if I go that route, I must constantly up and
> downcast...
>
>      From my limited understanding of gobject I would think those 
> widgets could return and take the real type and all will work well? am
> I 
> wrong? or are those historical reasons?

Whatever type is returned, you'll have to do lots of casts, so whatever
convention is used, there's no avoiding that. And returning GtkWidget*
is just the current convention.

I personally would prefer correct types to be used in the API, just to
show exactly what type to expect at runtime. But that's a separate
issue.

-- 
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