Builder Update

Hi Everyone!

For those in the Los Angeles region, I'll be speaking at Scale13x on Saturday about Builder. Come see some demos.

I've been hard at work since getting back from the Cambridge Hackfest and FOSDEM. Thank you everyone that went out of their way to find me at FOSDEM and send me warm wishes. That means a lot to me.

I just published an update on the mailing list about where we are with LibIDE. Things are coming together quickly, and I'm excited about the quality of the library.

For those of you that are writing libraries in GObject/C, you must check out the combination of g_autoptr() , G_DECLARE_DERIVABLE_TYPE() and G_DECLARE_FINAL_TYPE() . These are major improvements going into GLib/GObject 2.44. LibIDE is built using these features and it has really lowered the number of lines of code. Even better, g_autoptr() has almost completely removed my need for goto failure; scenarios. It still happens when interacting with older code, but for new libraries, this is pure magic.

I'm going to keep sprinting to add features and merge the wip/libide branch of Builder up until 3.16. Since we are such an early project, I think getting code into the release is more important than adhering to code freeze. My sincere apologies to translators.

One neat process of building LibIDE is that it has made it much easier to unit test things. Most of the development happens by creating little programs that exercise a particular feature. This means that you'll be able to take advantage of Builder functionality in scripts and the command line.

IDE Scripting landed this week in the wip/libide branch. That means you'll be able to create things like search engines, device providers, and build system extensions all from the scripting engine. Once document management is pushed into LibIDE, you'll be able to hook the file saving and loading process.

Anyway, I have so much to write about... and never enough time.

-- Christian Hergert 2015-02-18

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