<refentrytitle>About</refentrytitle>

<title>Why use GObjects in libpurple?</title>

There are many benefits GObjects can bring to purple. Some of

which we have implemented ourselves already and others that we've

considered adding in the past but no one has gotten to yet.

One of the biggest benefits is the type system. While it's a bit

more work to start up a GObject class, the benefit of using a

tested type system makes it worth it. Right now we're only lightly

using inheritance. For example: PurpleBlistNode is the base class

for PurpleBuddy, PurpleChat, PurpleContact, and PurpleGroup. There

are quite a few problems with the current setup. It's error prone,

theres no type checking, and it's impossible to subclass unless

the new "type" is added to libpurple itself.