halting problem :: GLib tools rewrite

glib-genmarshal

• if you’re using glib-genmarshal --header --body to avoid the “missing prototypes” compiler warning when compiling the generated marshallers source file, please switch to using --prototypes --body. This will ensure you’ll get only the prototypes in the source file, instead of a whole copy of the header.

• Similarly, if you’re doing something like the stanza below in order to include the header inside the body:

  foo-marshal.h: foo-marshal.list Makefile
          $(AM_V_GEN) \
            $(GLIB_GENMARSHAL) --header foo-marshal.list \
          > foo-marshal.h
  foo-marshal.c: foo-marshal.h
          $(AM_V_GEN) (
            echo '#include "foo-marshal.h"' ; \
            $(GLIB_GENMARSHAL) --body foo-marshal.list \
          ) > foo-marshal.c
  

  you can use the newly added --include-header command line argument, instead.

• The stanza above has also been used to inject #define and #undef pre-processor directives; these can be replaced with the -D and -U newly added command line arguments, which work just like the GCC ones.

• This is not something that came from the Python port, as it’s been true since the inclusion of glib-genmarshal in GLib, 17 years ago: the NONE and BOOL tokens are deprecated, and should not be used; use VOID and BOOLEAN, respectively. The new version of glib-genmarshal will now properly warn about this, instead of just silently converting them, and never letting you know you should fix your marshal.list file.

If you want to silence all messages outside of errors, you can now use the --quiet command line option; conversely, use --verbose if you want to get more messages.

glib-mkenums

The glib-mkenums port has been much more painful than the marshaller generator one; mostly, because there are many, many more ways to screw up code generation when you have command line options and file templates, and mostly because the original code base relied heavily on Perl behaviour and side effects. Cargo culting Autotools stanzas is also much more of a thing when it comes to enumerations than marshallers, apparently. Imagine what we could achieve if the tools that we use to build our code didn’t actively work against us.

• First of all, try and avoid having mixed encoding inside source code files that are getting parsed; mixing Unicode and ISO-8859 encoding is not a great plan, and C does not have a way to specify the encoding to begin with. Yes, you may be doing that inside comments, so who cares? Well, a tool that parses comments might.

• If you’re mixing template files with command line arguments for some poorly thought-out reason, like this:

  foo-enums.h: foo-enums.h.in Makefile
          $(AM_V_GEN) $(GLIB_MKENUMS) \
            --fhead '#ifdef FOO_ENUMS_H' \
            --fhead '#defineFOO_ENUMS_H' \
            --template foo-enums.h.in \
            --ftail '#endif /* FOO_ENUMS_H */' \
          > foo-enums.h
  

  the old version of glib-mkenums would basically build templates depending on the phase of the moon, as well as some internal detail of how Perl works. The new tool has a specified order:

  • the HEAD stanzas specified on the command line are always prepended to the template file
  • the PROD stanzas specified on the command line are always appended to the template file
  • the TAIL stanzas specified on the command line are always appended to the template file

Like with glib-genmarshal, the glib-mkenums tool also tries to be more verbose in what it expects.

Ideally, by this point, you should have switched to Meson, and you’re now using a sane build system that generates this stuff for you.

If you’re still stuck with Autotools, though, you may also want to consider dropping glib-genmarshal, and use the FFI-based generic marshaller in your signal definitions — which comes at a small performance cost, but if you’re putting signal emission inside a performance-critical path you should just be ashamed of yourself.

For enumerations, you could use something like this macro, which I tend to employ in all my projects with just few, small enumeration types, and where involving a whole separate pass at parsing C files is kind of overkill. Ideally, GLib would ship its own version, so maybe it’ll be replaced in a new version.

Many thanks to Jussi Pakkanen, Nirbheek Chauhan, Tim-Philipp Müller, and Christoph Reiter for the work on porting glib-mkenums, as well as fixing my awful Parseltongue.