GtkBuilder, Vala and WebKit

This article is about a set of bugs that used to exist, and are in various stages of getting fixed. As such this is merely a historical anecdote. I had planned to write about something entirely different, and hopefully more useful, but I ended up having too much fun with this to just ignore it.

To use a WebKitWebView inside a GTK+ template, one needs to workaround the fact that WebKitWebView breaks the heuristics in GtkBuilder to guess the GType from the human readable type name. That’s easy. Anybody who has used GObject is likely to have encountered some dialect of g_type_ensure, or, as the more learned will point out, GtkBuilder has a type-func attribute for cases like these.

The fun begins when you start debating which workaround to use.

It turns out that type-func doesn’t work with Vala.

A few buglets in GtkBuilder means that if you use class and type-func together, the latter will be ignored. It’s likely nobody used them together because even if class is specified as mandatory the parser doesn’t enforce that. On the other hand, the Vala compiler effectively treats class as mandatory because it doesn’t understand type-func. So, you must use both to avoid a build failure, but if you do, you get a run-time failure because your type-func is ignored.

So, typeof (WebKit.WebView) wins, which is Vala’s equivalent of g_type_ensure.

I don’t know how things are with other language bindings. Vala is what I happen to be using right now, so that’s where I chose to focus.

Thanks to Saiful, for pointing out the problem with WebKitWebView and GtkBuilder. It was fascinating.