Comments on: 17.08.2007 What are ELF libraries good for anyway?

By: Thomas Vander Stiche

Thomas Vander Stiche — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 11:11:21 +0000

Splitting off GLib and GObject for 2.0 was one of the best things that ever happened for GStreamer.

Before that, I had to run an XVfb server just to be able to run audio-only GStreamer applications on my X-less server. GTK *needs* a running X display just to be able to pass by gtk_init(), it was terrible.

By now there’s a bunch of programs that use GLib without GTK+. Just in our company, there is GStreamer, Pigment and Flumotion happily running with GLib and without GTK+.

I also don’t understand why you advocate a merge back of GLib into GTK when your examples are about merging GObject with GLib again so you can fix GHashTable ? Maybe I’m missing something obvious ?

And how is saving 4 MB for something you don’t need in your app in the first place a bad thing ?

By: Joseph Garvin

Joseph Garvin — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 20:19:51 +0000

I think you can fudge partial classes in C++ by simply using #include. It’s not what it’s normally used for, but #include is essentially a simple copy and paste mechanism. I haven’t tried it myself, but I don’t see why you couldn’t put the definition for each class function in it’s own .cpp file (but that doesn’t #include the class’s header) and then have one glue file that #include’s the header and then all of the individual .cpp’s.

By: Spider

Spider — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 11:31:39 +0000

Just an FYI, quite a few console-only applications like to link against glib (irssi is the one that pops up in my head right now) and trust me that I’d be seriously ticked off if I needed GDK+X on a small 256Mb flash-based appliance just to run my IRC client off there.

By: Rémi Cardona

Rémi Cardona — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 07:03:29 +0000

On my home server, I use irssi which depends on glib but is obviously a CLI application. So, no X nor Gtk on that machine.

IMHO, the C functions of the glib are really useful on their own, I think a better question would be : “who is is using GObject without using Gtk?”

By: bboozzoo

bboozzoo — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:58:43 +0000

well, that could be mc
ldd `which mc`
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libglib-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0xb7f07000)
libgpm.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgpm.so.1 (0xb7f01000)
libslang.so.2 => /lib/libslang.so.2 (0xb7e41000)
libnsl.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnsl.so.1 (0xb7e2a000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7ce9000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb7ce5000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libm.so.6 (0xb7cbe000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fad000)

By: Henry

Henry — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:48:38 +0000

I belive GTK+ requires quite a few bits of X and other sundry thing wheras Glib only depends on libc. I for one would be most unhappy to see this decoupling go away.