gobject-introspection, a new friend to help

GObject introspection is a new technology still being actively developed. From Fedora 15 onwards we can actually use its power to develop or use libraries written in many different languages in different languages :) Primarily to show case how to use super fast libraries written in other languages (like C ) directly in Python.

It makes sense to build many kinds of applications using (at least) two different levels and languages. Those being C+GObject, and a managed (GC'd) runtime. C is good for graphics, multimedia, and lower level systems work. However, writing complex software is difficult and error-prone without garbage collection. A managed runtime such as Vala, JavaScript, Python, Java, Lua, .NET, Scheme etc. makes a lot of sense for non-fast-path application logic such as configuration, layout, dialogs, etc.

Thus, one of the major goals of the GObject introspection project is to be a convenient bridge between these two worlds, and allow you to choose the right tool for the job, rather than being limited inside one or the other. With the introspection project, you can write for example a ClutterActor or GtkWidget subclass in C, and then without any additional work use that class inside JavaScript.

This talk will go through the skeleton on a simple library written in vala and later will use it in Python without doing not much extra work.

Someone who loves python. Wrote a small book on Python (http://fedorahosted.org/pym ), works in Red Hat as a Software Engineer. Contributed to many FOSS projects.

One can find more about him at http://kushaldas.in