Support for dynamic types

[shutton]

glib_wrapper! doesn't appear to have any support for dynamic types (types that become available after being loaded from a dynamic library)

https://developer.gnome.org/gobject/2.64/GTypeModule.html#G-DEFINE-DYNAMIC-TYPE:CAPS

[sdroege]

What's your use-case? glib_wrapper should handle these just fine, but there's no subclassing support for dynamic types yet.

[shutton]

Subclassing 😔

In my particular case, things go sideways when you call g_type_get_plugin() on a instance of a subclass (in C land).

[sdroege]

For usage with a specific library or ...?

But if you have any suggestions how that could look like API-wise that would be useful. I'm mostly worried about the safety aspects here (unloading code is unsafe), that needs some thinking.

Apart from that this should in theory only require adding bindings for GTypePlugin (probably can be at least partially autogenerated) and then a new register() function in src/subclass/types.rs that does the dynamic registration instead.

[sdroege]

In my particular case, things go sideways when you call g_type_get_plugin() on a instance of a subclass (in C land).

That should only return NULL but otherwise should not cause any other problems. What happens?

[shutton]

It does return NULL. Alas, it's a part of a [proprietary] system that uses that object for further introspection on the loaded library (namely, plucking out some exported symbols). It's something that can be worked around, but full support obviously isn't quite there yet.

[sdroege]

Apart from the safety aspects this shouldn't be too hard to implement in any case, see above if you're interested in working on that :)

[shutton]

Quite possibly, but I'm still a Rust novice, so it might be a bit 😉

[sdroege]

Sure, feel free to ask here if you need some help :)

[sdroege]

See #1169