Re: OT comprehending large application (was What, in detail, the GDK do)

[David Nečas <yeti physics muni cz>]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 08:44:05AM -0500, Patrick wrote:
> Does any one person actually understand 18K pages of this code or is it  
> just a case of sticking to a small section? Could any pros out there  
> explain how you tackle this monumental task?

By combination of two means:

1) Understanding of the concepts.

On this level all widgets are the same.  They are GObjects, their source
code is similarly organized, they can be created, destroyed, mapped,
unmapped, realized, unrealized, resized, they can receive events and
draw themselves and do a few other things.  Many do not do all.  Some
are containers and organize other widgets inside.  And that's just it.

2) Following the specific code I'm interested in.

In a good IDE (such as vim ;-) this is usally easy.  Since people often
expect the widgets to do something reasonable even in non-reasonable
situations this may involve reading code carefuly working about some
obscure problem unclear to you.  But keeping the big picture in mind the
general purpose of the code should be still clear.

I don't think anyone understands all the Gtk+ code, but it is not
necessary.  Figuring out how something in Gtk+ works has never been a
big problem for me.  The hard part is always to figure out how something
*should* work.

Yeti