[ANN] ocaml-gir: automated binding generator

[Camarade_Tux]

I'm pleased to announce a preview release of ocaml-gir. ocaml-gir is
an automated binding generator for glib-based libraries.

It works by parsing the output of gobject-introspection[0] which in
turn works by parsing header files. gobject-introspection doesn't work
on preprocessed sources and is able to take advantage of the
glib-style C macros to improve the library interface description.

It is currently in alpha/beta stage and is able to bind most of
WebKit-gtk and DBus-GLib and both are working here. Other libraries
are *partially* supported (i.e. gcc finds errors in the C code). The
description of the libraries is often broken because of
gobject-introspection itself (it strips out GError** paramaters...) or
incomplete because of a lack of annotations.

ocaml-gir is hosted on the ocamlcore forge[1] using git and its
sources are accessible through git-web[2]. A tarball is also
available[3].

ocaml-gir ships with the .gir/.xml files generated by this tool and
modified to fix various errors, expand annotations or improve the
caml-side api (only once right now). Therefore, trying to use
gobject-introspection to generate the description again is not
advised.
There is README explaining quickly how to use ocaml-gir in the source folder.

Compared to camlidl, its main advantage is to work on .h files rather
than on .idl ones. My first motivation for ocaml-gir was to get
webkit-gtk. I knew its API was changing often and I didn't feel like
checking everything every few weeks.
Another difference is that ocaml-gir tries to follow lablgtk's API
style. For example, it uses polymorphic variants to bind C enums.
Moreover, I wasnt't sure how camlidl was going to handle structs named
like WebKitWebView which ocaml type should be web_view.
However ocaml-gir probably has a ton of bugs and isn't complete yet
(the api exposed will change a bit and every "feature" isn't bound).

Also, one has to keep in mind automated binding generation from C
isn't magic. An int* could be an int array or an out-parameter and
int** or int*** would be even more annoying to deal with. It requires
source-code annotations.
A language with an actual array type and richer types, with functions
able to easily return several values and with exceptions may not need
them.


[0] http://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection
[1] https://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/ocaml-gir/
[2] http://git.ocamlcore.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=ocaml-gir/ocaml-gir.git
[3] https://forge.ocamlcore.org/frs/download.php/286/ocaml-gir-preview.tar.gz


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Adrien Nader

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