Re: [Vala] Hello and a question.

[Raffaele Sandrini <rasa gmx ch>]

On Sam, 2007-03-03 at 13:13 -0300, Alexandre Moreira wrote:
> Hello everyone. I've been following some of the development of Vala
> without being a user for quite some time now.
>
> Just joined the list (Thanks Jürg, for pointing the list) and would
> like to make a question. Here it goes:
>
> I'm writing something in Gtk+ (An extensible text editor to use as
> basis for multiple IDE development) and considering to take advantage
> to the fact that I have a lot of specification but not much
> implementation, to migrate it to Vala.
>
> Unfortunately I use a rather weird feature of GObject and I don't know
> if Vala can do it. I thought you guys could help me figuring it.
>
> The thing is, I wanna have an interface that describes a certain set
> of functionality for some widgets I'll use, but one of the
> requirements (as in extending interfaces) of such interface is that it
> can only be implemented by descendants of GtkWidget.
>
> Unfortunately GtkWidget is no interface, so I can't really extend an
> interface there. However, using the same method for extending
> interfaces, GObject allows me (and a whole bunch of Gtk+ code) to make
> the interface require another "interface" called GtkWidget.
>
> Is that possible with Vala ?
Not yet. We're still having some issues regarding multiple interfaces
and subtyping. I tried to solve that weeks ago but failed to get it
right.
Question is: Is an Interface subtyping tree the same as interface
dependency? Can one be reduce to the other? This heavily influences if
we can apply java/c# style interfacing to vala or if we need to create
some new thing to reflect gobject interfaces.

> One other thing I would need for this project and would like to know
> is: Is there a set of wrapped definitions for GtkSourceView to use
> with Vala projects ? If not, how hard would it be to make one ?
Not yet. GObject base libraries are generally pretty easy to wrap using
"vapigen" [1] to generate them automatically.

> Thanks in advance,
> Alexandre Moreira.
>
> PS: I love the idea of this project, a nice syntax to generate the
> same old boilerplate code we have to use everyday in Gtk+ programming
> is awesome!
Thanks.

Raffaele

[1] svn://paldo.org/vala/trunk/vapigen