# GObject Introspection Reference Manual

This document is for GObject Introspection version &version;. The latest version of this documentation can be found on-line at http://developer.gnome.org/gi/unstable/.

## 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:

## API Reference

### GIRepository

### GITypelib

### TODO

Index

Index of deprecated symbols

Index of new symbols in 1.29.0

Index of new symbols in 1.29.17

Index of new symbols in 1.30.1

Index of new symbols in 1.34

Index of new symbols in 1.35.8