GLib/GObject+C as the lingua franca? (was: kwallet and QCA)

[koos vriezen]

2008/7/25 Stefan Teleman <stefan.teleman at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
>
>> the same can be done with other frameworks. glib isn't magical in this regard.
>
> http://www.gtkmm.org/download.shtml
>
> GLib-2 and Gtk+-2 already have C++ wrappers (and so do pango, atk and cairo).
>
> My question is: instead of to writing OO in C (which has been fondly
> described by some as "putting makeup on a pig: the pig doesn't enjoy
> it, and the end result is frightening" :-), wouldn't it be more
> efficient to use the already existing C++ wrappers ?

No, because when we need something that uses another toolkit to play
nicely in KDE, the dependencies should be as small as possible. Just a
quick example:
$ nm -D /usr/lib/libgtkmm-2.4.so.1.0.30 |grep ' T ' |wc -l
8932
$ nm -D /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so |grep ' T ' |wc -l
3535
so almost a triple extra symbols to resolve at load time.

Maybe some 'use Qt for every job' may dislike gtk or plain C in
general, but a. they either have no clue what happening beneath it
and/or b. are too stubborn to look over their horizon anyhow. Others
will pick up the job.
Btw. Vala is a nice alternative to get a nice OO language w/o extra
dependencies (for as long as it takes of course)

Koos


> Just my  0.02 question.
>
> --Stefan
>
> --
> Stefan Teleman
> KDE e.V.
> stefan.teleman at gmail.com
>