[Help-smalltalk] AbstractAutoload

[Denis Washington]

Hi,

First of all, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Denis Washington, 
and I am a student living in Berlin, Germany. I just stumbled upon GNU 
Smalltalk a few months ago, and I must say I love it! I am really 
impressed by the beauty of Smalltalk, especially when being able to use 
it in the "for-those-who-can-type" style that GNU Smalltalk supports. 
Many thanks to Paolo and everyone else who made this happen!

I am currently playing with the idea of implementing GObject 
Introspection [1] bindings for GNU Smalltalk, which would allow the 
run-time generation of bindings for GObject libraries with the 
appropiate introspection metadata. This does not only include GTK+ and 
Glib, but many others such as Clutter and GStreamer, for which we would 
then have bindings "for free". I don't know if I have the skills needed 
to do this (I know C fairly well, but am only learning Smalltalk), but I 
guess it doesn't hurt to try. ;)

Anyway, here is my actual question. I want to implement the bindings 
generation lazily - a GObject class should be bound only if and when it 
is first needed. I looked through the base classes and found out that 
there is an Autoload class which does something similar, but only does 
autoloading through file-ins. Therefor, I propose the addition of an 
AbstractAutoload as a superclass of Autoload where most functionality of 
Autoload is moved, plus the ability to let subclasses specify how a 
class is autoloaded. For instance, it could have a class method 
class:in:loadDo: that allows to create subclasses like the following:

 AbstractAutoload subclass: GObjectAutoload [

     class: nameSymbol in: aNamespace [
          ^super
              class: nameSymbol
              in: aNamespace
              load: [
                  "Create wrapper for GObject class and return it"
              ];
              yourself
     ]
 ]

Such an AbstractAutoload would probably also have other uses, for 
instance for other automatic bindings or similar magic.

What do you think?

Regards,
Denis