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TODO

Memory managment

GirFFI does not attempt to free any memory at the moment, or lower the reference count of any objects it gets from GObject. This task therefore involves two parts:

  • Free non-GObject pointers as needed (at garbage-collection time)
  • [Done!] Lower reference count of GObjects (at garbage-collection time)

Use memory_profiler to check memory use (https://github.com/SamSaffron/memory_profiler)

Refactorings

These in the order they occured to me, and may therefore be fixed in any order.

  • Create Type objects for all FFI types, including the ones currently represented by a single symbol, so we can always do stuff like

    GirFFI::Types::UInt8.get_value_from_pointer(ptr)

    rather than having awkward dynamic method dispatch inside GirFFI::InOutPointer.

  • Move to a single Pointer class, rather than InPointer, InOutPointer and Pointer monkeypatching.

Derived types

Derived classes are now registered like so:

class Derived < Base
  install_property GObject.param_spec_int("foo", "foo bar",
                                          "The Foo Bar Property",
                                           10, 20, 15, 3)

  # assume Base defines a virtual function called 'some_vfunc'
  install_vfunc_implementation :some_vfunc, proc {|obj|
    # implementation goes here
  }

  def other_vfunc
    # implementation
  end

  # assume Base defines a virtual function called 'other_vfunc'
  install_vfunc_implementation :other_vfunc
end

GirFFI.define_type Derived

Potential improvements:

  • Allow define_type to be called in the class definition
  • Perhaps auto-register types, like Gtk# does
  • Perhaps automagically find vfunc implementations, like PyGObject and Ruby-GNOME do
  • What about properties?

NOTE: When adding an interface module to a derived class, its prerequisites should be checked.

Persistent Ruby GObject identity

GirFFI should make sure that if it gets a pointer to a GObject for which a Ruby object already exists, the existing object is returned. This involves the use of WeakRef, no doubt.

Handle fundamental objects that are not GObject.

This is a big one. See commit 1e9822c7817062a9b853269b9418fd78782090b5 in gobject-introspection, and TestFundamentalObject in Regress.

The tests for TestFundamentalObject accidentally pass, but there may be hidden issues.

Check binding of GObject:

(11:37:03 PM) walters: the basic story is that GObject should be manually bound
(11:47:02 PM) ebassi: the really necessary bits are: GObject/GInitiallyUnowned memory management; properties accessors; GSignal connection API
(11:47:15 PM) ebassi: the rest is "nice to have"
(11:47:37 PM) ebassi: oh, and probably GBinding - but that's just because I wrote it ;-)

Use FFI::DataConverter to automatically convert GObject types

GirFFI now generates loads of Something.wrap(ptr) calls; Perhaps these can be replace by implementing to_native and from_native in ClassBase and including FFI::DataConverter.

Handle Variants more nicely

Currently, GirFFI requires the user to create GVariant objects by hand, and retrieve values from them by hand as well. Ideally, we would have .from_ruby and #to_ruby methods or somesuch that do this for us. Some classes, like GAction, require a specifice VariantType to be used consistently. Special logic will have to be put in place for that.

Handle ownership-transfer correctly

For how to handle objects, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=657202#c1

Miscellaneous

  • Move GObjectIntrospection to GIRepository, and allow generating its own members.
  • Do something useful with the versioning info in the GIR

External dependencies

Things that I think GirFFI cannot fix:

  • gobject-introspection should correctly mark private fields as not readable.
  • gobject-introspection should ignore functions that are only defined but not implemented, or implement those cases in GIMarshallingTests.

See Also

dnote