On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 10:15 +0100, ole nielsby pils org wrote: > My language binding needs to be able to deal with text and tree > iterators. > How does ... other languages deal with these beasts? They are indeed best treated as GBoxeds. ++ It took me a long time to figure out just what the heck was going on with GtkTreeIters and GValues for that matter. It turns out that in C the API is blindingly simple to use in this regard: one stack allocates a local variable and then passes it in by reference. Ta da. Language binding these, however, makes a big mess. We have to create and register a Proxy object (which is both the alloc'd struct C side and a full Object Java side pointing at it) which all involves several round trips... just to create a throw away boxed struct. And then worse: since it was alloc'd and not stack, we have to wait WAY longer before it gets cleaned up (relative to it being discarded on function return. In most cases there's not much I can do about this. The occasional hand coded override gets around this, but by in large you need them a few times in a row in GTK terms, and, well, that's that. Oh well. Interesting case study in the API design impact of making a C library bindable by other languages, though. One of the rare cases I've come across where the C code is more straight forward than the higher level language. I rather suspect that if things like GtkTreeIter and GValue hadn't predated language bindings the whole concept might have been done differently. Something to mull over for the future. AfC Hobart
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