[OE-core] [PATCH 00/29] Add gobject introspection support to oe-core

[Alexander Kanavin]

On 11/11/2015 01:40 AM, Burton, Ross wrote:
>
> On 10 November 2015 at 23:10, Phil Blundell <pb at pbcl.net
> <mailto:pb at pbcl.net>> wrote:
>
>     Why does gobject-introspection (presumably giscanner, right?) need to
>     run binaries on the target at all?  I thought it operated mostly on the
>     source code.
>
>
> Same reason gtk-doc's scanner executes code: vast amounts of relevant
> information can't reliably be extracted from source but is trivial to
> introspect at runtime (GObject hierarchy, properties, signals, etc).

Yep; the real problem is that GObject is implementing OOP semantics in a 
language that doesn't natively support them. So you can't extract 
information about those either from the source code, or from the 
finished binaries, or during binary build. The only way to do it is to 
run the actual binary and ask it to describe itself.


Alex