Proposal: An Xfce C++ language binding for GTK+

[Benedikt Meurer]

David Fraser wrote:
>> First off all, I've to say, that I've looked into GFC a few weeks ago 
>> in quite some detail, and discovered some parts where I'd prefer the 
>> Gtkmm way. These are mostly details, though. In general I think that 
>> GFC is a good attempt to wrap the Gtk+ API.
>>
>> I've been thinking of - and working on - language bindings for Xfce 
>> for over a year now. I have several initial attempts with C++ (using 
>> Gtkmm mostly), D, Scheme and Ruby bindings (and Olivier came up with 
>> the idea of Python bindings recently) hanging around on my harddisks. 
>> That said, none of these attempts satisfied my needs. What I'm looking 
>> for is a general "wrapper kit", that allows to easily integrate 
>> another language into Xfce w/o the need to maintain another language 
>> binding (as you might know, Xfce has only a few developers, and we 
>> can't maintain x language bindings like Gnome).
> 
> I'm relatively new here - just know that wxPython uses SWIG to 
> autogenerate most of the wrappers. That's for a fairly complex C++ 
> toolkit but it works really well.

I wasn't talking about wrapper generators, cause they tend to cause the 
maintance problems I described above. I was talking about a generic 
framework for language bindings, similar to what DotNET was originally 
invented for, but more generic maybe.

But I agree with Brian here, this would be a lot of work, impossible for 
an open source project like Xfce to handle this in spare time. We'd 
probably need a team of 3-4 software developers working full-time on 
this for about a year, maybe two.

> David

Benedikt