Re: signal mechanism

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf mayn de>]

Owen Taylor wrote:

>> who´s currently maintaining the Gtk+ signal mechanism? I looked at the
>> sources but didn´t find any clue about that..
>> 
>> I´m currently trying (together with Tero Pulkkinen from Gtk-- and two
>> others) to get a new project running. It´s about creating a standard signal
>> mechanism, with similar interface even in different languages, extensible
>
>The GTK+ signal mechanism is not maintained separately from
>the rest of the GTK+ core. Tim Janik <timj@gtk.org> has been
>doing a large fraction of the maintenance on the core 
>object-model parts of GTK+ recently, but questions should probably
>be addressed here rather than to anyone in particular, since
>there are a number of people who might be interested. (Myself,
>for instance.)


Ok, this is a summary by Tero Pulkkinen (the Gtk-- maintainer):


-------------------------------
Okay, lets collect all the facts first:
* Goal is to make a callback system which can be reused easily without 
changes to the code in other projects.
* language independence is important to keep consistency and allowing people
only learn it once. (long term goal - its not clear what languages already
have implemented gtk's signal system and if they're suitable for this)
* Type safety is important in all languages (some of the languages will do it
in runtime, others in compile time)
* Extension modules should be easy to plug into it - like a corba module to
allow compability of signal interfaces made in different languages and
platforms
* Some neat packaging for the callback system, so that projects can easily
use always the newest version.
* Removing dependencies to gtk or other libraries to maximize possibilities of
reuse.
* Object model? Should signal/slot system deal with the object model too?
How will the current way (using C++'s object model) work well on other
languages? Can the interface to signal system be made consistently to
all those languages? How will the signal/slot system plug into existing
object models like found from gtk?

Any other things? (lets make a document ready and neat looking before
announcing anything - maybe could then convert it to a web page before
announcement:)

-- 
-- Tero Pulkkinen -- terop@modeemi.cs.tut.fi --

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To Adrian, Tero and Nicholas: Are you subscribed to gtk-devel? If we better
stay on this list its better if we're all subscribed (extreme-CCing isn't
much fun).

Cu
	Christian