Re: Floating references

[Chris Vine <vine35792468 gmail com>]

On Tue, 6 Jun 2017 22:10:39 +0200 (CEST)
Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak lingonborough com> wrote:
> 6.06.2017 21:41 Chris Vine <vine35792468 gmail com> wrote:
> > [...]
> > No one is suggesting reworking. This is no more than intellectual
> > interest in the original design choice.  
>
> I wasn't around when this design choice was made so I can only
> guess. I can only repeat what Tristan has already said:
> this is a feature of GInitiallyUnowned and its descendants
> rather than all GObject instances. At least that was originally,
> maybe it was changed later but remained to avoid breaking the
> backward compatibility.

GObjects not derived from GInitiallyUnowned are indeed weird, as I think
you are suggesting.  They start with a reference count of 1 but without
an owner.

But on further thought I suspect you are right: the floating reference
was to circumvent this problem.  So I guess the question is why pure
(non-GInitiallyUnowned) GObjects start with a reference count of 1,
instead of a count of 0 as in other similar implementations.  Starting
with a count of 0 would have made floating references unnecessary.

Chris