[Kde-bindings] smoke (non-q)object ownership proposal/question

[Petr Vanek]

here is my initial draft of a question/proposal for smoke:

Meta Information in Smoke

The following is about the QT4 smoke bindings but is applicable to any  
smoke binding.

libsmoke provides sufficient information for making mechanical  
bindings for QT4, but needs to provide more information in order to  
allow language bindings to use the library safely.  For example,  
ownership of objects is not always clear.  It is not enough to know if  
an object has been created by smoke or directly by the QT4 library;  
instead, to manage memory properly, the ownership of the object must  
be known, and this can only be known from how the object is used by  
the API.

With objects descended from QObject, ownership is generally clear, but  
with objects of other classes it's not always clear.  For example,  
when you call QLayout::addItem(QLayoutItem *item) - the ownership of  
item is transferred to the QLayout.

Qore's "qt4" module currently uses special argument and return value  
handlers added onto methods to handle such cases - mostly to tag  
objects as being externally owned or managed by the qore module (i.e.  
safe to delete).

Is there any idea or plan to provide this kind of information in a  
generic way in smoke (somehow in a per-library way) so that it could  
be used by any client of the binding?

If not, from my not very deep knowledge of smoke, I was imagining that  
the best way would be to provide a mechanism in smoke itself to track  
ownership of objects and then to provide a way in smoke itself to  
manage the ownership status of the object based on some simple rules  
(i.e. QLayout::addItem() called on the object - object externally  
owned, QLayout::removeItem() called on the object, object not  
externally owned).

all the best,
petr