[Geany-Devel] Plugins sharing resources

[William Fraser]

On 10/04/2013 22:49, Lex Trotman wrote:
> It makes sense when the resource is only available per sci.
>
> There is no "global" set of markers, just that Geany always set up the same
> set for its own use in each sci.
>
> Even if a plugin uses the same markers in each sci, regardless of language
> or other settings, it still has to set them up and release them on each
> sci.  It is more likely though that a plugin will only use markers on a few
> sci.
>
> So the plugin will have to be allocating the resource per sci anyway, and
> it will need to track it, yes.

This is the way I have done it in numberedbookmarks. I use the
g_object_set_data() and g_object_get_data() functions passing
G_OBJECT(sci) as the first argument, thus attaching a pointer to a
structure that can be used to keep track of resource use on a per sci
object basis. Other than having to watch out for memory leaks of the
structures when shutting down, I think that this is best option to track
resource use. What's more, I'm no GTK expert and have not tried it, but
but using g_object_set_data_full() would probably be an easy way to
prevent memory leaks.
>> 2. If they are above the limit, check how much per-sci will improve
>> the things. If it's less than, say, 15%, per-sci makes no sense.
>>
>> 3. If per-sci still seems reasonable, provide some logical to physical
>> mapping, so that the plugins woudn't need to remember each allocated
>> resource separately for each sci.
>>
> Unless they are set and forget uses, the plugin still has to remember them
> to be able to use them.
If a you're going to create a structure holding handles to the resources
used on a per sci object basis to ensure no clashes in resource use
anyway, then it would be a simple matter to write a function returning
the handle of a numbered resource. A plugin would not then have to
remember which ones were allocated, but could simple call the function
with the resource number and sci object, with the knowlage that if null
were returned then the resource was not in use.

However I feel that this slightly goes against the ethos of geany and
geany-plugins being as light-weight as possible by adding another
function to the geany-plugins api that is not essential. A plugin writer
would have insight into if a plugin needed to keep track of resource use
or not (geany-plugins would be keeping track of which resources were in
use or not anyway, so there is no need to replicate this if a plugin
didn't need to remember this information once a resource had been
established), and it would be a relatively simple matter of adding a
simple way of keeping track of which resources a plugin uses. On the
other hand, having such a simple function would keep plugins simpler,
and thus less likely to contain any bugs.

William