virtual signal system ?

[Bo Lorentsen <bl lue dk>]

Hi ...

I have been looking into the GFC class system for inspiration, and when 
looking at this library many things looks almost but not quite like 
gtkmm. But gtkmm is the most used and supported library so I guess it 
would be smart to support this, and it certainly do work, I have to say. 
But this, I don't hope, does not mean that Gtkmm can't improve :-)

There have reasonly been some discussion about overhead, and size of a 
Gtkmm application, and it seem Gtkmm was guilty in some unnecessary 
overhead. To solve some of these problems in GFC, it used "virtual 
signal system" to decouple (see description in : 
http://gfc.sourceforge.net/faq.html) the signal overhead, from the 
default widget tree.

As I understand it, Gtkmm uses some kind of (pseudo) automatic generated 
code, so this should be possible to alter, but the compatibility issue 
still remains, and the model may take some getting use to for the 
developers using it.

The gain from this model would be better performance (not a lot of 
unused virtual function), and lower memory footprint (no or very small 
vtables).

Is this possible, or are the strong reasons not to do things like this ?

/BL