In the last year working at Xamarin, I have learned lots of new things (.NET, Cocoa, …), and since the beginning of that, I was thinking on bringing some of that nice stuff to GNOME, but didn’t really had the chance to finish anything. But, fortunately, being free now (on vacation), I finally finished the 1st thing: GObservableCollection, a thread-safe collection implementation which emits signals on changes.
It is based on ideas from .NET’s ObservableCollection and concurrent collections, which I’ve used successfully for building a multi-thread data processing app (with one thread updating the collection and another consuming it), so I thought it would be a good addition to GLib’s API. This class can be used on single-threaded apps to easily get notifications for changes in a collection, and in multi-threaded ones for, as mentioned above, easily share data between different threads (as can be seen on the simple test I wrote).
This is the 1st working version, so for sure it will need improvements, but instead of keeping it private for a few more months, I thought it would be better getting some feedback before I submit it as a patch for GLib’s GIO (if that’s the best place for it, which I guess it is).