Comments on: Introduction to GObject Introspection

By: Wolfgang Oertl

Wolfgang Oertl — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:20:36 +0000

Today I found your work on GObject/Gtk language bindings. I have written lua-gtk, which uses automatically generated information about types, classes etc., but by parsing the output of gccxml. Quite similar to what you’re working on, isn’t it? By using compile-time generated minimal perfect hashes with the data, code and data size is kept small. Link to the project’s website included…

By: Carl Fredrich Bolz

Carl Fredrich Bolz — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:12:10 +0000

Johan: While I agree that it would be nice to have a way to write extension modules that run with all the various Python implementations, I don’t think it is realistic to use the normal CPython extension modules for that. I don’t think the work of the IronPython guys to support CPython extension modules will be going anywhere. It’s basically one huge hack at the moment and I don’t really see a way to implement it cleanly. The memory model that the extension modules expect (having reference counted C structures) is just too different from that of .NET, which has a safe object model with a moving GC.

Besides, there are quite some extension modules that don’t just use the official API but poke around in the object internals, which obviously cannot be supported at all.

If you want one binding for all runtimes your chances are much better if you do them with ctypes. Sure, ctypes isn’t the nicest thing ever, but at least it is mostly independent of the underlying Python implementation. In fact, both CPython and PyPy already support it and there was a SoC-proposal to implement it for Jython (I don’t remember whether it got accepted).

By: johan

johan — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:00:36 +0000

Carl: Having multiple Gtk+ bindings for reach runtime is not ideal.

PyPy should either follow IronPython’s lead and implement enough of the CPython api to be able to run the extensions specific to CPython or start looking into abstracting the current Gtk+ bindings to be implementation independent.

By: Carl Fredrich Bolz

Carl Fredrich Bolz — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:55:35 +0000

Further ahead or not, I am really looking forward to it. It’s the only realistic chance of getting GTK bindings for PyPy. Thanks for doing this work!

By: johan

johan — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:25:46 +0000

Pretty far, we need a proper typelib first. After that pybank needs some love to support that.
Its a worthwhile goal, but its further ahead, I’ll be focusing on languages which generate code for now, such as vala or pygtk.

By: kripken

kripken — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:28:51 +0000

I seem to recall something about using GObject-Introspection to automatically create Python bindings in runtime. Do I remember correctly, and if so, how close are we to getting to that?

By: lucasr

lucasr — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 19:04:13 +0000

Dude, this is amazing work! Thanks!