Re: new gtk2-perl

[Jörn Reder <joern zyn de>]

muppet wrote:

> read the rest, and get the code, at
> http://asofyet.org/muppet/software/gtk2-perl/new-gtk2-perl.html

Ok, I read it and I must admit: I'm not expert enough to understand all
the details (in particulary about the depths of the type system). But 
what I understood sounds good in my ears ;) In particular I appreciate 
the clean XS build system (hey - I voted for XS already last year - 
check the archives ;) and the usage of code generators.

I did only small parts of Gtk2-Perl development, added only a few things
which I actually needed to get my own applications working - just to do
the work instead of bothering the Gtk2-Perl main developers. Also for me
the Inline stuff was really hard to cover. My feeling was it introduces
a lot of overhead and not making development easier. Obviously I'm not 
alone with this opinion ;)

I think it's always a good idea to use code generators where possible. 
Gtk1-Perl used this technology and the result was a feature rich and 
stable Gtk Perl binding (beside this nasty MakeMaker incompatibility 
which never got fixed officially and thus became Top#1 FAQ here ;).

Ok, a lot of "untested" code is produced by a generator. But in my 
opinion most generated code need no in-depth testing (presuming the code
generator itself is more or less error free), *because* it is generated.
If we assume that the underlying C API works correctly (what we indeed 
do ;), there is no reason why a mostly generated Perl binding shouldn't.
Sure, where special handling is needed, it should be done specially. 
It's a bad idea to try to build a code generator, which also covers the
special cases. But every generated bit of code saves a lot of work, and
the easy things, which of course can easily be generated, are the 
majority here.

Although on my first attempt a "make test" in the Gtk2/ directory of 
your tarball reported a lot of errors (beside other things it tries to 
allocate 4294967276 bytes of memory ;) : I think this is the right way 
(I'll do some in-depth debugging on what's going wrong here later).

I hope the new Gtk2-Perl API won't change too much, but I don't see a 
reason, why this should happen. From my understanding the Perl side of 
the Gtk2 API isn't called into question here.

Just my 2 cents...

Regards,

Joern

-- 
Joern Reder
supporting:   http://www.zyn.de/
unbelievable: http://www.exit1.org/
CPAN:         http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-authors/id/J/JR/JRED