GObject Introspection's goal is to describe the APIs and collect them in a uniform, machine readable format.
GIR XML format
There's an XML format called GIR used by GObjectIntrospection. The purpose of it is to provide a common structure to access the complete available API that a library or other unit of code exports. It is meant to be language agnostic using namespaces to separate core, language or library specific functionality. There are currently only C based tools that work on the format, but it's meant to be usable to use in other situations, for instance to/from another set of languages.
Typelib
The typelib is a to disk version of the GIR designed to be fast, memory efficient and complete enough so that language bindings can be written on top of it without other sources of information. It is normally compiled from a GIR when a library/program is installed and accessed from the language binding or another application who wishes to use the information.
Tools
Three tools are shipped with GObject Introspection:
- g-ir-compile, a typelib compiler. It converts one or more GIR files into one or more typelib blobs. It can either emit the raw typelib blob or C code (--code).
- g-ir-generate, an GIR generator, using the repository API. It generates GIR files from binary typelib which can be in a shared object, or a raw typelib blob.
- g-ir-scanner, a tool which generates GIR XML files by parsing headers and introspecting GObject based libraries.
API library
There's also a C based library called libgirepository which provides an API to access to the typelib metadata. It also contains an API to invoke functions, given the function info object. The implementation is based on libffi (3.0 or higher of libffi required, can be found at http://sourceware.org/libffi).
There are a number of GIR test files in tests/, and a script to do roundtrip tests (GIR -> typelib -> GIR).
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