[cairo] GObject

[Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro]

Qua, 2006-01-11 às 08:41 -0800, Bill Spitzak escreveu:
> It seems that Cairo itself has successfully implemented a large thing 
> (the cairo_t) without using GObject or any "base" library. I see no 
> reason that the text layout cannot do the same thing.
> 
> What exactly does GObject provide and why is it so hard to remove from 
> Pango?

  glib + gobject is about 850K + basic data structures.  Most of this is
shared between multiple applications.  To use pango you don't even have
to use the glib main loop.

  Incorporating pango into cairo would mean two text layout
implementations -> bad for fixing bugs, bad for memory usage.  You
probably can't make pango use the cairo text layout api without breaking
pango api.  And pango api cannot be broken, period.  And you don't
honestly expect all the apps using pango to start using a new API for no
good reason, do you?  I mean, for cairo drawing you get lots of new
features relatively to the gdk/x11 drawing, but from pango to cairo text
you get nothing in return.  Also, we'd need new language bindings (!)
Without gobject reference counting and enums/flags introspection, things
become much harder for dynamic languages.

  This whole thread is a really bad idea.  I am tired of linux
development platform always shifting APIs for mediocre reasons.
Stability counts much more than 850K of shared memory.

  Regards.

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
<gjc at inescporto.pt> <gustavo at users.sourceforge.net>
The universe is always one step beyond logic.
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