I’ve been playing with a preprocessor called gob2, which I only recently discovered. I found it because I actually had the same exact idea as the author. I was reading the Gnome 2 Developer’s Guide, and realized that although GObjects are nice and handy when they are already coded (as in all the widgets in GTK), they are actually a pain in the ass to write from scratch. Tons of boilerplate code, tons of macros you need to code to keep yourself sane.
So, I thought, what if some code produced all this boilerplate code for me? Someone already had the idea. It’s called GOB (or gob2), the GObject builder. Check it out.
What’s so nice about it is that it tries to have the feel of Java or C#. So, check out this definition of a new GtkWidget which counts the number of clicks it receives. If you run gob2 gtk-button.gob, it will produce gtk-button.{c,h} with all the proper GObject boilerplate code you’ve come to expect coding by hand.
Much nicer than doing that from scratch.
What’s strange is that more GTK+ developers aren’t using this. On the gob2 mailing list, the author claims it is used in gnome-vfs, but doesn’t it seem like it should be used by a lot of developers? (Granted, it’s not as nice as using gtkmm/C++ I guess, but there are still people declaring objects in C out there).