Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 12:31 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:

Hey Alex,

Great that you are planning to redesign the VFS.

> Here is my current GInputStream:
> 
> struct _GInputStreamClass
> {
>   GObjectClass parent_class;

Using GTypeInterfaceClass here would make it much more easy to let
library and application developers implement the GInputStream interface
in a for-their needs suitable way.

Because the gtype system has infrastructure that makes it more easy.

Using a GObject it would also be a lot more difficult to let such a type
implement multiple interfaces: the developer would have to inherit.
Unless in C++, you can't multi-inherit in most programming languages.

Language binding generators like gapi and pygtk's one know how to deal
with GTypeInterface. For example by putting define-virtual in the defs
file of a Python language binding generation helper-files, it would be
easy and possible to implement a GInputStream in Python.

In .NET it wouldn't (not at this moment) be possible to use the
GTypeInterface as a real "interface" as known in the .NET world. Nor
could a Java language binding do this (as this would require significant
adaptations to both the compiler and virtual machine of the
environment), but I know there's plans to ease creating language
bindings for situations like these. For example by creating an abstract
class where the developer has to implement the methods.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend 
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be 
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be