Re: boxed types and copies

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 12 Dec 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> The recent gtk_signal_emit() change broke the text widget - I'm using
> GTK_TYPE_TEXT_ITER, GTK_TYPE_STRING, etc. for the signal signature, 
> at James' request, so Python can emit these signals.
> 
> However these signal args MUST be passed by reference, it is far too
> slow to copy the inserted string, and the iterator is supposed to be
> modified by the signal handlers.
> 
> Moving gtk_signal_emit() to the GValue collector causes it to
> copy-by-value every boxed argument. So I either have to move back to
> GTK_TYPE_POINTER and break language bindings, or leave GtkTextBuffer
> broken.

Moving back to simply using G_TYPE_POINTER would be very bad for
language bindings (and the change for the GtkCTreeNode signal arguments to
G_TYPE_POINTER has made the ctree almost unusable to language bindings).

One possible solution is to allow `derived' G_TYPE_POINTER values.  By
this, I mean they would have the same semantics as G_TYPE_POINTER, but
have a different type code, so that language bindings could have a
chance of handling them correctly.

James.