GObject Introspection Reference Manual: Part I. GObject-Introspection Overview

# Part I. GObject-Introspection Overview

GObject-Introspection is striving to provide a middleware layer between (GObject based) C libraries and language bindings. The primary goal of this project is to minimize duplicated effort in language binding projects by providing shared metadata files on bound C libraries. Language bindings can read these metadata files at runtime to learn how to interface with a bound C library.

The GObject-Introspection package contains of a few different parts:

- The GIR XML format - an XML format describing the exported C API including documentation

- The GTypelib format - a binary format optimized for fast disk access and low memory usage

- g-ir-scanner - parses C source code and gtk-doc comments and generates GIR XML files

- g-ir-compiler - compiles GIR XML files into typelibs

- libgirepository - library to access typelib from C

The following illustration shows how the different components fit together: