Hi Neil, Neil Jerram <n...@ossau.homelinux.net> skribis:
> Another relevant factor is that I need relatively few guile-gnome entry > points because I'm only using gobject/glib to get gdbus, and the UI is > built with Edje, not Gtk/Gnome. In fact it's a strange (but IMO fun) > hotchpotch: > > - Edje/Evas for the UI (using 17 pointer->procedures) > > - GDBus to access the oFono D-Bus API (using pointer->procedures: 3 > for basic GObject stuff, 11 for GVariant handling, and 2 for GDBus). > > and I will probably add in more stuff for audio routing (PulseAudio?) > and accessing contact information (whatever the latest evolution of > Evolution Data Services is). Sounds like a lot of fun. :-) > I think the key benefit is that the (system foreign) approach is so > immediate. I just add whatever API I need there, and the hack > continues... Yes, that’s really neat. > My only reservation - and quite a big one - is that it's a bit like > going back in time to when compilers had no type checking for pointers. > In that sense it is rather fast and loose, compared to C programming. Indeed. Plus, you sometimes have to be careful about memory management, specifically making sure the lifetime of C objects matches that of their companion Scheme objects. > But overall I love it, and I'd suggest that an alternative question (to > the one you asked above) would be why do you think we need bindings > anymore? Well, these are still bindings. :-) It can be written more quickly, but you still have to do a bit of polishing to make the API more Schemey, write a test suite (esp. to mitigate the “loose” aspect of the FFI), etc. > Well I hope that's of interest, and I'm sure you'll have interesting > counter-thoughts... In case you or anyone wants to look at the code, > I've pushed it to http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/ossaulib.git/. The > main script is at scripts/phone. Looks great! I had a glance at the E17 bindings, and I see that the API uses raw pointer objects; using “wrapped pointer types” would provide type checking, and a nicer UI if you add printers. :-) Cheers, Ludo’.
