Re: Towards guile-gtk 0.18

[Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>]

> I'm a bit worried about the size of gtk-glue.c, too.  Does it need to
> be that big?  Is the compiled code too bloated, too?  Maybe it would
> be acceptable to just generate some table for each function and then
> have one generic glue function that peruses this information.  Maybe
> this wouldn't work for all of them, but for the majority.

Some historical perspective: people used to make fun of the Mach
microkernel because it wasn't very "micro" --- it was bigger than a
BSD kernel on the same machine.  And it didn't even have filesystems,
networking stacks, and so on.

It turns out that a full half of the executable was due to
automatically generated RPC stubs.  The whole thing was based on
message-passing; even system calls were done by having the process
send a message to the kernel.  They used MiG (the Mach Interface
Generator) to describe the interfaces and generate client and server
messaging stubs; the kernel had lots of server stubs linked into it.
And the stubs were really big.

I'm not sure if this helps you solve your present problem, but I guess
it's worth noticing that this "Gosh, our automatically generated
interface adapter stubs are kind of big!" scene has been played out
before.  Many more times than once, I'd guess.  So some genuinely
clever thinking is required here.