Berlin DX Hackfest / Day 3

the third, and last day of the DX hackfest opened with a quick recap as to what people have been working on in the past couple of days.

we had a nice lunch nearby, and then we went back to the Endocode office to tackle the biggest topic: a road map for GTK+.

we made good progress on all the items, and we have a fairly clear idea of who is going to work on what. sadly, my optimism on GProperty landing soon did not survive a discussion with Ryan; it turns out that there are many more layers of yak to be shaved, though we kinda agreed on the assumption that there is, in fact, a yak underneath all those layers. to be fair, the work on GProperty enabled a lot of the optimizations of GObject: property notifications, bulk installation of properties, and the private instance data reorganization of last year are just examples. both Ryan and I agreed that we should not increase the cost for callers of property setters — which right now would require asking the GProperty instance to the class of the instance that we’re modifying, which implies taking locks and other unpleasant stuff. luckily, we do have access to private class data, and with few minor modification we can use that private data to store the properties; thus, getting the properties of a class can be achieved with simple pointer offsets and dereferences, without locks being involved. I’ll start working on this very soon, and hopefully we’ll be able to revisit the issue at GUADEC, in time for the next development cycle of GLib.

in the meantime, I kept hacking on my little helper library that provides data types for canvases — and about which I’ll blog soon — as well as figuring out what’s missing from the initial code drop of the GTK+ scene graph that will be ready to be shown by the time GUADEC 2014 rolls around.

I’m flying back home on Saturday, so this is the last full day in Berlin for me. it was a pleasure to be here, and I’d really like to thank Endocode for generously giving us access to their office; Chris Kühl, for being a gracious and mindful host; and the GNOME Foundation, for sponsoring attendance to all these fine people and contributors, and me.