From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mga03.intel.com (mga03.intel.com [134.134.136.65]) by mail.openembedded.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B7D8E736B6 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 2015 13:13:09 +0000 (UTC) Received: from fmsmga003.fm.intel.com ([10.253.24.29]) by orsmga103.jf.intel.com with ESMTP; 11 Nov 2015 05:13:10 -0800 X-ExtLoop1: 1 X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="5.20,275,1444719600"; d="scan'208";a="598267074" Received: from kanavin-desktop.fi.intel.com (HELO [10.237.68.161]) ([10.237.68.161]) by FMSMGA003.fm.intel.com with ESMTP; 11 Nov 2015 05:13:09 -0800 Message-ID: <56433F27.60001@linux.intel.com> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 15:14:15 +0200 From: Alexander Kanavin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Icedove/31.8.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: openembedded-core@lists.openembedded.org References: <5641FFD4.1050506@windriver.com> <56420F08.1050209@linux.intel.com> <56421DA6.5080700@windriver.com> <1447197016.2907.2.camel@pbcl.net> <56433A3D.9060104@linux.intel.com> In-Reply-To: <56433A3D.9060104@linux.intel.com> Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/29] Add gobject introspection support to oe-core X-BeenThere: openembedded-core@lists.openembedded.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.12 Precedence: list List-Id: Patches and discussions about the oe-core layer List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 13:13:10 -0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On 11/11/2015 02:53 PM, Alexander Kanavin wrote: >> Same reason gtk-doc's scanner executes code: vast amounts of relevant >> information can't reliably be extracted from source but is trivial to >> introspect at runtime (GObject hierarchy, properties, signals, etc). > > Yep; the real problem is that GObject is implementing OOP semantics in a > language that doesn't natively support them. So you can't extract > information about those either from the source code, or from the > finished binaries, or during binary build. The only way to do it is to > run the actual binary and ask it to describe itself. FWIW, I also think that GObject made a disastrous decision to avoid a high-level IDL with a preprocessor-to-C tool to describe those things (similar to what Qt does with Qt-specific extensions to C++); instead, they force everyone to write GObject boilerplate directly in C, which is absolutely horrible to read, write and maintain. Just try reading the GObject developer's manual without getting a headache. It's partly out of these frustrations that Vala was born, and Gnome made the decision to switch to Javascript on top of gobject introspection. Alex