Crate glib

Expand description

Rust GLib and GObject bindings

Rust bindings and wrappers for GLib, part of gtk-rs-core.

GLib 2.48 is the lowest supported version for the underlying library.

This library contains bindings to GLib and GObject types and APIs as well as common building blocks used in both handmade and machine generated bindings to GTK and other GLib-based libraries.

It is the foundation for higher level libraries with uniform Rusty (safe and strongly typed) APIs. It avoids exposing GLib-specific data types where possible and is not meant to provide comprehensive GLib bindings, which would often amount to duplicating the Rust Standard Library or other utility crates.

Minimum supported Rust version

Currently, the minimum supported Rust version is 1.56.0.

Dynamic typing

Most types in the GLib family have Type identifiers. Their corresponding Rust types implement the StaticType trait.

A dynamically typed Value can carry values of any StaticType. Variants can carry values of StaticVariantType.

Errors

Errors are represented by Error, which can carry values from various error domains such as FileError.

Objects

Each class and interface has a corresponding smart pointer struct representing an instance of that type (e.g. Object for GObject or gtk::Widget for GtkWidget). They are reference counted and feature interior mutability similarly to Rust’s Rc<RefCell<T>> idiom. Consequently, cloning objects is cheap and their methods never require mutable borrows. Two smart pointers are equal if they point to the same object.

The root of the object hierarchy is Object. Inheritance and subtyping is denoted with the IsA marker trait. The Cast trait enables upcasting and downcasting.

Interfaces and non-leaf classes also have corresponding traits (e.g. ObjectExt or gtk::WidgetExt), which are blanketly implemented for all their subtypes.

You can create new subclasses of Object or other object types. Look at the module’s documentation for further details and a code example.

Under the hood

GLib-based libraries largely operate on pointers to various boxed or reference counted structures so the bindings have to implement corresponding smart pointers (wrappers), which encapsulate resource management and safety checks. Such wrappers are defined via the wrapper macro, which uses abstractions defined in the wrapper, boxed, shared and object modules.

The translate module defines and partly implements conversions between high level Rust types (including the aforementioned wrappers) and their FFI counterparts.

Documentation

Using

We recommend using crates from crates.io, as demonstrated here.

If you want to track the bleeding edge, use the git dependency instead:

[dependencies]
glib = { git = "https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk-rs-core.git", package = "glib" }

Avoid mixing versioned and git crates like this:

[dependencies]
glib = "0.13"
glib = { git = "https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk-rs-core.git", package = "glib" }

License

glib is available under the MIT License, please refer to it.

Re-exports

pub use ffi;

pub use gobject_ffi;

pub use self::closure::Closure;

pub use self::closure::RustClosure;

pub use self::error::BoolError;

pub use self::error::Error;

pub use self::object::Cast;

pub use self::object::Class;

pub use self::object::InitiallyUnowned;

pub use self::object::Interface;

pub use self::object::IsA;

pub use self::object::Object;

pub use self::object::ObjectExt;

pub use self::object::ObjectType;

pub use self::object::SendWeakRef;

pub use self::object::WeakRef;

pub use self::signal::signal_handler_block;

pub use self::signal::signal_handler_disconnect;

pub use self::signal::signal_handler_unblock;

pub use self::signal::signal_stop_emission_by_name;

pub use self::signal::SignalHandlerId;

pub use self::types::ILong;

pub use self::types::Pointer;

pub use self::types::StaticType;

pub use self::types::StaticTypeExt;

pub use self::types::Type;

pub use self::types::ULong;

pub use self::value::BoxedValue;

pub use self::value::SendValue;

pub use self::value::ToSendValue;

pub use self::value::ToValue;

pub use self::value::Value;

pub use self::variant::FixedSizeVariantArray;

pub use self::variant::FixedSizeVariantType;

pub use self::variant::FromVariant;

pub use self::variant::StaticVariantType;

pub use self::variant::ToVariant;

pub use self::variant::Variant;

pub use collections::List;

pub use collections::PtrSlice;

pub use collections::SList;

pub use collections::Slice;

pub use self::char::*;

pub use self::source::*;

pub use self::send_unique::SendUnique;

pub use self::send_unique::SendUniqueCell;

Modules

boxed

IMPL Boxed wrapper implementation.

boxed_inline

IMPL BoxedInline wrapper implementation.

Error binding and helper trait.

functions

object

IMPL Object wrapper implementation and Object binding.

prelude

Traits and essential types intended for blanket imports.

send_unique

shared

IMPL Shared (reference counted) wrapper implementation.

signal

IMPL Low level signal support.

source

subclass

Module containing infrastructure for subclassing GObjects and registering boxed types.

thread_guard

translate

Translation between GLib/GLib-based FFI types and their Rust counterparts.

types

Runtime type information.

value

Value binding and helper traits.

variant

Variant binding and helper traits.

wrapper

IMPL The wrapper! macro and miscellaneous wrapper traits.

Macros

bool_error

Generic error used for functions that fail without any further information

clone

Macro for passing variables as strong or weak references into a closure.

closure

Macro for creating a Closure object. This is a wrapper around Closure::new that automatically type checks its arguments at run-time.

closure_local

The same as closure! but uses Closure::new_local as a constructor. This is useful for closures which can’t be sent across threads. See the documentation of closure! for details.

g_critical