On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 13:37:02 +0000 Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltst...@posteo.de> wrote: > Hello Guile Users! > > I would like to understand guile-gi better, hopefully at some point I will be > able to create GTK applications using Guile. But perhaps my understanding is > wrong, so I want to ask a few things: > > guile-gi – I think this stands for "Guile Gnome(?) Introspection"?
The "gi" stands for gobject-introspection. > gi – I think this "introspection" part of the name is about inspecting sources > and deriving code from that, to make use of Gnome libraries. Or is it for GTK? Instrospection is available for any library with a gobject-introspection typelib. That includes glib and GTK and most of the gnome stack. /usr/lib[64]/girepository-1.0/ will contain the typelibs available on your distribution. There will be many of them. > Which things are part of GTK and which things are part of Gnome? Currently my > picture is: GTK contains all the GUI things and Gnome the data things. For > example: GTK might contain some date picker dialog or popup or whatever, but > the > datatype for date itself would be part of Gnome. "GDate". As such Gnome > provides > a sort of common datatypes basis, which could be used by other frameworks as > well (and maybe is?). No. > So guile-gi makes use of introspection to give access to Gnome datatypes, or > does it create bindings via FFI for an already existing C code base, which is > the actual introspection for Gnome stuff? I am not certain what you mean but gobject-introspection provides bindings for C libraries written to GObject conventions which make them available to higher level languages such as python (pygobject), javascript (gjs) and guile scheme (guile-gi and g-golf). pygobject is widely used; gjs is used by gnome-shell amongst others. > And finally: Is my expectation correct, that I will be able to make GTK > applications using Guile, if I learn to use guile-gi? It will mainly work although I believe there are a few missing pieces which you are unlikely to encounter. Look at some of the examples in the guile-gi repository. Also look at g-golf.
