News from the introspection world

There has been a number of recent developments in the world of introspection, let me summarize some of them:

First of all, the litl got uncovered and released a couple of weeks ago. The whole litl software platform is heavily dependent on the introspection parts and on the gjs, the spidermonkey javascript bindings. It’s been a great experience of easily being able to move code between javascript and C as we see fit. Adding a new method to a GObject class in C is just a make a away from making it available to the javascript bindings. Lucas and Scott have written more about the technical parts of the litl.

Gjs has recently gained callback support, which has been kind of a personal pet peeve for me. Making sure that functions and methods with callbacks are possible to call from a language binding has always been difficult. GClosure sort of solves that problem, unfortunately very few libraries actually use them. Most of the tricky work of landing callback support in Gjs was done by Maxim Ermilov, rock on!

The Python bindings are also moving along pretty quickly. Tomeu Vizoso and Simon Van Der Linden has been working aggressively on making them solid. The rumor tells me that Tomeu has the whole OLPC Sugar interface running on top the new bindings, with significant speed and memory improvments!

Elliot Smith at Intel blogged about his experiences on using Gjs on Moblin developing a clutter application. Zach Goldberg writes about his experiences on adding callback support to the python bindings.

More and more libraries are adding introspection support, the latest ones are libgda and moblin toolkit.

This entry was posted in Blogroll, General, GNOME, olpc, PyGTK, Python. Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to News from the introspection world

  1. Pingback: Johan Dahlin » Blog Archive » News from the introspection world « Noya Khobor

  2. Raphael says:

    Callback support? Woot! I hope that means more asynchronous js in gnome-shell?

  3. Gustavo Carneiro says:

    It’s great to see introspection moving forward.

    I am looking forward to the day when gnome-python-* drop dead; does that make me a bad maintainer?.. 😛

  4. Simon says:

    @Gustavo – is that the plan, then, that language bindings like the Python ones will be reduced to providing only the support for accessing everything else through introspection?

  5. Daniel Espinosa says:

    You said libgda gain introspection. I’ve created the patch, but the current GObjectIntrospection doesn’t detects the default invoker for some virtual methods see bug #597961, do I missed some updates becouse libgda doesn’t have in master introspection support as log as I know… Or you know some annotation I can use to solve this bug please write me an email.

  6. Marco Diego Aurélio Mesquita says:

    Man, take a look at this old bug[0]

    Share your opinions, new toughts and propose thing that would help you with the introspection work.

    Also, have a Tristan’s new works[1].

    Thanks!

    [0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=447972

    [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/tvb/2010/03/14/composite-saga-continues/

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