RE: signals versus vfuncs

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

> forgive me i'm completely off my rocker here, but i seem to recall 
> discussion on this list not too long ago to the effect that 
> ... whereas 
> in the past convention dictated that all overridable methods

I guess you are talking about the function pointers in the structs, which I
sometimes call vfuncs.

> should 
> have an associated signal, this is no longer the convention.

There are lots of these vfuncs without signals, particularly in Ginterfaces
such as TreeModel, and in CellRenderer, and in GDK and ATK classes.

What is less common is signals without overridable vfunc default signal
handlers. As far as I know, we have only seen these since GTK+ 2.4. gtkmm
can cope with that now, though I guess that the inconsistency might confuse
people.
 
> is this correct?  if so, what's the rationale?  i understand that 
> overriding class closures and calling 
> g_signal_chain_from_overridden is 
> odd and clunky and all that, but having the marshalling 
> metadata around 
> for virtual methods is really important for language bindings!

Maybe you face different problems with perl, but I don't understand the
problem here. Maybe a specific example of a signal/vfunc would help.

Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc usa net