Native GTK bindings v2

[Artur Skawina]

On 04/22/12 00:06, Marco Leise wrote:
> Am Sat, 21 Apr 2012 21:46:18 +0200
> schrieb Artur Skawina <art.08.09 at gmail.com>:
> 
>> On 04/21/12 19:16, Marco Leise wrote:
>>> I just noticed cairo.d is still a dummy. I am using image surfaces. 
>>
>> Yes, cairo.d is generated from GI data too and only contains the few symbols
>> and types required to use the other libs. There are other cairo D bindings, which
>> probably could be used with a small glue layer. Making sane cairo bindings is
>> on my to-do list, but I won't have the time for that in the next few weeks. 
> 
> No hurry, I have GtkD. It's biggest win is that it is considered stable and usable by many for a long time.
> 
>> "-ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -Wl,--gc-sections" is a good idea, but I found it to break exception throwing for my programs.
>>
>> GDC/DMD? Would you happen to have a small contained sample that breaks?
>> Not garbage collecting sections means executables that are several times
>> larger (IIRC for the small gtk example the difference was 1.2M vs 0.3M).
>>
>> artur
> 
> No example. I don't know what I tried it on, but I remember that I was hunting a bug that occurred, because an important exception wasn't thrown. I think it was a plain old "throw ...". It was with GDC, since DMD doesn't offer a one-section-per-function flag. I can give it a second try. I didn't post any bug reports, since gc-sections is a difficult beast:
> https://bitbucket.org/goshawk/gdc/issue/293/ffunction-sections-fdata-sections-for
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=788107
> Without support from Iain, I don't expect a bug would be fixed by adding some hack to keep a function from being garbage collected (or whatever caused me problems).

The first bug is about GDC having gc-sections as a *default*, which Iain seems to think
isn't important because a) phobos will be a shared library soon and b) it needs testing.
I agree with the latter, but the former is wrong - it will be many, many years before
even considering using a phobos DLL will be an option (for reasons that i mentioned in
#293).
The second ticket is about some already fixed upstream binutils bug.

I've been running with phobos built using "-ffunction-sections -fdata-sections" since ~
the time of #293 and so far haven't seen any problems (which of course doesn't mean that
there aren't any). 

Preventing a section from being garbage collected could be as simple as adding "KEEP()"
around its name in the linker script. But i've failed to reproduce any problems.
I'll need to remember to keep adding the options to every app makefile, because so far i
often didn't bother to do it... But, at least for exceptions, i wouldn't expect problems,
as the C++ case is already handled and GDC uses a similar scheme.

artur