[maemo-developers] Maemo's glib version, lobbying for GIO

[From: Philip Van Hoof]

Hi there,

Efficient streaming affects memory usage and performance on mobile
devices a lot. The more we needlessly copy IO data around, or the more
we need to wrap each other's self-invented stream-like apis, the slower
the final result (the device) will be.

This is absolutely not good. Especially not for the mobile situation.

Therefore I'm pleased that at the level of glib a team has started
working on GIO.

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/glib/trunk/gio/

GIO not only comes with a streaming API, but also with a standard way
for making cancellable asynchronous APIs. It uses the Asynchronous
pattern for this which results in types like GAsyncResult and a type
GCancellable.

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/glib/trunk/gio/gasyncresult.h
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/glib/trunk/gio/gcancellable.h


As Tinymail's main developer I would like to start using these types as
soon as possible (that's instantly after my first release). I would like
to standardise on how future glib GObject based libraries will do async
APIs that are cancellable and I would like to standardise on my stream
related APIs too.

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/glib/trunk/gio/goutputstream.h
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/glib/trunk/gio/gunixinputstream.h


To sooner I can do this, the fewer times my API will need to be broken,
the fewer major releases I have to do. The less headaches development
teams depending on Tinymail, like Modest's team, will have.

If after this current distro Maemo would not get a glib for half a year
that includes a GIO, people like me could be blocked for the entire time
from delivering APIs like E-mail ones unless I hack-in a standalone
version of GIO (sounds ugly to me, but if necessary ...).

My questions ...

Therefore I wonder about what the plan is for Maemo's glib version. How
soon will Maemo upgrade? What can we do to help speeding up GIO's
inclusion into Maemo? Would a standalone version be acceptable?


My opinion ...

.. is that the sooner we have this API in Maemo, the sooner application
and- library developers will be synchronised with each other's APIs and
IO sharing. For example HTML components need to share IO with the E-mail
framework (inline attached images in base64 encoding). The VFS needs to
share IO with the E-mail framework (Attachment->Save As). The media
player (hi there Valagume developer!) could share IO with the E-mail
framework (streaming an attached MP3), or GStreamer could share the IO
(a source element that knows about GIO's streams).

A lot of libraries expose asynchronous APIs. At this moment are most of
them having their own nuance differences. With a generic infrastructure
for asynchronous APIs in gio, libraries could finally start doing it in
a standardised way.

Making things more easy for application developers. Making things more
easy for language bindings. Making things contain less bugs.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be