GObject Introspection is an open source and freely distributed library software implemented in C and designed from the ground up to be used for describing APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), as well as to collect them in a machine readable and uniform format.
The library uses an XML file format called GIR in order to provide a common structure, which can be used for accessing the complete available API exported by a library or any other unit of code. It is written entirely in the C programming language.
Comprises of various tools
GObject Introspection is shipped with various tools, among which we can mention g-ir-compile, a typelib compiler that can convert one or more GIR files into typelib blobs; g-ir-generate, a GIR generator that can generate GIR files from binary typelib; g-ir-scanner, a utility that generates GIR XML files.
Getting started with GObject Introspection
Installing the GObject Introspection library on your GNU/Linux operating system is quite an easy task, as all you have to do is to open your package manager, search for the ‘gobject-introspection’ package and install it with a double mouse click.
If you would like to first optimize it for your hardware architecture (32-bit or 64-bit are supported at this time) or operating system, download the latest version from Softpedia, where it’s distributed as a tarball (TAR archive).
Save the archive on a location of your choice, extract it, open a terminal emulator and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/gobject-introspection-1.42.0).
Optimize and configure the program by executing the ‘./configure’ command, followed by the ‘make’ command to compile GObject Introspection. Finally, install it system wide by running the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user or the ‘make install’ command as root.
