Hi Matt, On Apr 3, 2010, at 18:45, Matt Arsenault wrote:
> Hi, > > I'm thinking of applying to Google summer of code for Haskell to > work on > gtk2hs. I'm thinking of writing a static binding generator based on > gobject-introspection data. Gobject-introspection is the new way to > develop bindings for GNOME. Yes, I think such a project would be interesting and I would support your application. Although I think you need a mentor at Google as well. Maybe you could mail Paolo Martini p.mart...@neuralnoise.com who had a SoC project when he bound the Cairo modules. > I think it could replace most of the current automatic code > generation, > and reduce the amount of work that needs to be done by hand. It would > replace the current ApiGen and associated Perl scripts, and make it > easier to maintain and produce new bindings to various GNOME libraries > which aren't currently bound, like telepathy. There is only a Perl script that extracts the documentation from the C sources, thereby producing an XML document. The apiGen tool isn't all that bad but its front-end is obviously not satisfactory since it would be better if it would use introspection. > I've thought of a few issues with doing this, such as introspection > not > having an annotation for whether a function causes a callback for > finding safe/unsafe functions, but those where it isn't obvious / > doesn't take a function aren't all that common, but overall I think it > would be better than the current system. apiGen marks every function as safe, thereby ensuring that nothing goes wrong. It also has quite a few whistles and bells to avoid generating signals that are definitely not for the end user. I would welcome it if its framework could be reused. One of the annoying issues with changing apiGen is that it does a clever job of detecting if a function is already present in Gtk2Hs: From the XML documentation it calculates a checksum and emits it into the generated function. The function can now be changed by the user. As long as the documentation does not change, apiGen will find that the checksum is the same (even if the function binding was changed afterwards). Thus, if apiGen changes, all checksums will be invalid and it will not honor if functions have been manually tweaked. > I'm also thinking it might be good to skip the c2hs layer in this new > tool, avoiding the issues with gtk2hs having to maintain its own old > c2hs fork vs. the regular version on Hackage. As a long term solutions, this is certainly interesting. It is a bit annoying that many functions that need to be tweaked manually become harder to write. Let me know what you decide! Cheers, Axel. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Gtk2hs-devel mailing list Gtk2hs-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gtk2hs-devel
