Hey all, I wanted to give a head's up to two of the larger changes going on in Unity source at the moment:
Better C++ & Hiding of C-isms ============================= Unity's foundations are in GNOME, all of which is written GObject C. However, Compiz is C++ and Unity is a plugin of Compiz. This means that most of Unity is written in C++, but with lots of hooks into C code sprinkled across the C++ sources. While this is great as it means we can keep up-to-date with the latest GLib/GIO/BAMF/Dee APIs without needing to wait for the *mm bindings (or create full bindings ourselves), it introduces a headache in two cases: * Reading the code is more difficult as we can switch between C++ and C multiple times in a function. * Managing memory is very difficult as we are dealing with many different memory management conventions (new/delete, malloc/free, ref/unref, smart-pointers, etc etc). So, we are going to try and embrace the world of C++ with a much more loving arms instead of treating it like the pet we're embarrassed of :) Over the coming weeks (and already some of this has started in trunk), you'll start seeing the code transform as it uses a few more features of C++, namely trying make good use of the nicer way to deal with memory management and trying to hide a lot of the leaked C/GLib types in the API with the equivalent C++ types. In addition to this, you'll start seeing thin wrappers (only covering methods we care about) around some of the more important GObjects that we use (from GLib/GIO/Dee/BAMF) which will encapsulate the C code in a reusable object. It means that we'll be able to confine much of the C code in a few classes where we can easily test for memory leaks and also be able to make implementation changes much more easily in the future. We're hoping to make Unity's codebase much more readable, much better commented and much easier to get started with if you are hoping to contribute. We now optionally build Doxygen documentation from trunk and we hope to make it even more useful as we retrospectively add more API documentation to the most important objects. Shared Library ============== Historically, we've designed Unity's "foundation" services to be accessible over D-Bus so Unity-2D could work with the same models that Unity does. However, with the move to C++ and the work described above to adhere to C++ standards more closely, we are hoping to share a lot more code this cycle. To this end, Unity's trunk now produces a libunity-shared library. This library is useless at the moment, but we will start moving the non-UI code from Unity's source (the interface with unity-panel-service, the implementation of the Dash specification) into this library, so Unity-2D can be built on the same foundations as Unity. This obviously has the benefit of reducing the amount of code we need to maintain between the two implementations, but it also means that the code will get much better testing and be much more stable. We also hope to share more settings between the two implementations. .. That's it for now, I'll be sure to keep everyone updated about the progress! -- Neil Jagdish Patel | Technical Lead Desktop Experience Team Canonical 27 Floor, Millbank Tower London SW1P 4QP Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings www.canonical.com _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
