Comments on: GLib is a technical disaster

By: ecky.l

ecky.l — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:53:00 +0000

Nice post - perfectly right ;-).

The idea o glib as a platform independent library is fine - still there are others, with a much cleaner and better documented API (I am talking of Tcl)

Making C object oriented is just ridiculous and stupid, IMO. The whole GObject branch.. keep it away! But well, being a computer professional always means to get the best out of compromises between different subjective opinions - and it was this way for sure, when GObject was invented…

By: Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri

Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 22:11:00 +0000

“The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
“ — Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Why not just implement POSIX standard where it lacks? Makes more sense to me.

In that fashion, why we should port GCC for another arch, we should write our own compiler.

By: Pete

Pete — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 21:38:00 +0000

To complain that Glib reinvents many standard c library functions is to forget that Glib runs on such a wide variety of platforms that these functions become far from “standard”.

So the applications can now use the one definition of Glibs standard functions. Or rely on a mountain of “./configure” and preprocessor macros to get everything right.

I’ll take Glib’s functions. Thanks.

By: Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri

Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:16:00 +0000

cwiis:

I agree GLib has useful basic data structures, but POSIX does have that and POSIX is a standard, so you can implement it anywhere you want. Also, GNU/LibC guys do have extensions, check for _GNU_SOURCE, so you can do more if you want.

But my main rant about these basic data structures is that they’re not that easy to use, if you check Linux Kernel implementation you’ll see they have a much nicer API.

By: Cwiiis

Cwiiis — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 11:52:00 +0000

I’ll have to disagree with this, I’ve been using GLib for a while, and while I agree that some bits are clunky (especially GObject), I’ve found it nothing but a joy to use over straight C, C++ with stl and Java.

GLib re-implements a lot of standard functions and objects for cross-platform compatibility - There aren’t many frameworks that are as easy to use and can boast such wide platform support.

Even taking your points on board, I think the phrase ‘technical disaster’ is a bit much too

By: lemody

lemody — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 10:40:00 +0000

this was quite nice to read … and i bet it was written after coding something in frustration i have to agree that if there are object oriented languages available why try to force C act like one? after all, you can always use C from C++ (like pretty much every C++ developer does).