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==========
Guidelines
==========
This page is intended as a guide describing the process of writing a language
binding for the GObject Introspection framework.
* Decide if you want to make a language binding which is implementation
agnostic or implementation specific. Some languages such as Python have
libraries which are available across implementations. The Python module
``ctypes`` is a binding for the libffi language binding, which is
implemented in a couple of different Python implementations. It's usually
easier to target a specific interpreter or compiler implementation so if you
unsure, write a specific one.
* For interpreted language implementations, construct the language binding on
top of the :doc:`libgirepository` library instead of writing a code generator.
It'll make it easier for developers to use your language binding as they
will be able to read the typelibs in runtime without having an extra
intermediate step to generate the language specific metadata. The
libgirepository library can also be used for bindings based upon code
generators as an optimization, its a lot faster to read metadata from the
typelib than it is to extract the metadata from the GIR XML files.
* Use the Everything library in your unittests, aim at testing all functions
there. Do testing as early as possible in the development of the binding, as
the code is likely to be more complex than you anticipate.
* Use the same coding style as your language. If libraries for your language
normally uses underscores do that as well. For instance, Java bindings
should have a method on it's GtkButton wrapper called ``setLabel`` and not
``set_label``.
* If there are existing GObject bindings, reuse them for improved
compatibility. It's a nice feature being able to use static bindings and
introspected bindings together. The Perl & Python bindings does that.
* Try to stay close to the C language semantics, for instance
GObject should be mapped to a class and gtk_button_set_label to a method of
that class:
* java: ``button.setLabel("foo")``
* javascript/python/vala: ``button.set_label("foo")``
* perl: ``$button->set_label("foo")``
* scheme: ``(send button (set-label "foo"))``
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