Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 09:16 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 14:33 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I'm well aware of interfaces. In fact my initial version used an
> interface for this. However, there are other aspects of the equation
> that has to be taken into account to. For instance, using a base class
> means you can inherit functionallity from the baseclass.

Just a little note: GTypeInterface types really act more as "mixins"
than "real" interfaces in GObject, as they can effectively support a
default implementation inside their own definitions.

> In fact, if you look at Java and .Net you will see that their streams
> are objects too, not interfaces.

This happens mostly because Java and .Net do not have a native concept
of mixin/role types and only have pure interface types; so the only way
they have to define an abstract type with default implementations is to
create an abstract object.

Anyway, there's no hard or compelling reason for using a GTypeInterface
instead of an abstract GObject.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,  E: ebassi gmail com
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net