Re: Announcing: Perl bindings for LibSoup

[Torsten Schoenfeld <kaffeetisch gmx de>]

On 25.05.2011 23:18, Emmanuel Rodriguez wrote:
> > But since WebKit also supports gobject-introspection, why not use it that
> > way as well?  It's still a little rough around the edges, but here's your
> > browser.pl example ported to use the introspection stuff.
>
> The introspection framework really looks nice. Your examples show that
> it's very easy to write the bindings for arbitrary C C libraries quite
> easily. What's the catch?  ;) Are there bugs or unimplemented parts?
> This is too nice to be true.

Well, all this has been cooking for a while: about six years.  But there 
are some rough edges remaining, some in gobject-introspection itself, 
many in the Perl bindings.  Nothing insurmountable though.

This is the future of language bindings (in a GNOME context at least).

> Is there a way to provide custom made XS methods to an introspection
> perl package? For instance, SoupMessageBody is defined as:
>
> typedef struct {
>         const char *data;
>         goffset     length;
> } SoupMessageBody;
>
> And provides no accessor for data or length. Is there a way to
> complete the introspection binding with extra XS methods?
> If so do you know of an existing cpan package that does this?

Adding custom XS methods is no problem: just write them as you normally 
would.  But in the case you mention, that's not necessary. 
gobject-introspection provides the means to get and set public fields of 
boxed types.  I don't remember right now how good the support for that 
is in the Perl bindings, however.