Re: [Vala] GDBus codegen support

[Luca Bruno <lethalman88 gmail com>]

On 23/05/2013 02:50, Tiago Katcipis wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> First of all congratulations on such a great idea such as Vala. I'm working
> on a very limited environment where C++ is not an option, so to do object
> orientation I'm using GObject. But writing GObjects by hand is quite
> annoying :-), so Vala is really a boost on GObject development, making such
> a high level language generating C code and with low overhead bindings is
> just great.
>
> But I'm working with a lot of legacy code written in C/Gobject, algo there
> is a lot of GDBus generated code (and of course, DBus interfaces
> descriptions, on xml). Now we started to use Vala and it is just great to
> write DBus interfaces, the client code and the server code, both are just
> easy and beautiful.
>
> But even it being simple...i just feel that I'm repeating myself, having to
> map what is defined on the DBus IDL xmls that generates the C code on
> Valacode by hand (i know the
> Vala code is pretty straightforward, but it is still duplication, manually
> doing this is error prone and just annoying). This kind of duplication
> irritates me, it does not seen to be healthy :-).
>
> Is there any plan on supporting Vala on GDbus codegen ? I would be very
> interested on doing it...and it really seems to be a good idea, but i may
> be missing something, or there is another tool that can help.
So you're asking a way to generate Vala code with gdbus-codegen? That 
indeed makes sense. There's no such program or plan for making it that I 
know.
I can see these possibilities:
1) Enhance current gdbus-codegen to support generating vala code. Note 
that this program is not written in vala obviously.
2) Create a separate gdbus like codegen for vala, and decide whether to 
ship this program with vala as contrib, as a valac option, or a separate 
project
3) Do not generate vala code at all, instead integrate the xml parser 
inside valac itself to create the necessary ast. I don't like this much 
as you can't see how vala maps from gdbus idl to vala.