]> This document is for GObject Introspection version &version;. The latest version of this documentation can be found on-line at http://developer.gnome.org/gi/unstable/. GObject-Introspection is striving to provide a middleware layer between (GObject based) C libraries and language bindings. The primary goal of this project is to minimize duplicated effort in language binding projects by providing shared metadata files on bound C libraries. Language bindings can read these metadata files at runtime to learn how to interface with a bound C library. The GObject-Introspection package contains of a few different parts: The GIR XML format - an XML format describing the exported C API including documentation The GTypelib format - a binary format optimized for fast disk access and low memory usage g-ir-scanner - parses C source code and gtk-doc comments and generates GIR XML files g-ir-compiler - compiles GIR XML files into typelibs libgirepository - library to access typelib from C The following illustration shows how the different components fit together: