On Thu, 2006-02-09 at 09:10 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: > + glib + pango: the only objection was Federico's gripe about the > floating reference in glib 2.9. Federico, do you have an update > on this? Most people seemed to be happy to go with the new versions > (new stuff is gslice, pango/cairo and unicode 4.1).
Floating references went in, and I still think they are a terrible idea for the reasons I wrote about in detail: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2006-January/msg00012.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2006-January/msg00051.html You have to understand floating references in the context of their original purpose. Quote: The complicated rules about GtkWidgets and their `floating' flag are there to avoid breaking *all* existing code. [From http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/1997-November/msg00245.html ] Floating references were added to GtkObject to avoid modifying *all* the apps written for GTK+ when we introduced reference counting. Today, putting floating references at the glib level is just a fetish for gratuitous complexity. Right now, my objection to floating references in stock glib is not that of a technical problem --- I think even the ABI issues with the original patches got resolved. [Can we get *real* confirmation on that, by someone who runs 2.12 language bindings with glib HEAD? Otherwise we are fucking ourselves in the ass very hard.] My objection is that floating references introduce a consistency problem for new APIs, a documentation problem, and it is just more pain for the average programmer who wants to learn our platform at the C/C++ level. Floating references do not help our users. Floating references do not help programmers, either; they just confuse them. Federico _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
