gnc-gnome-utils C++ conversion

[Russ Gorby]

Ahh thats good information john. Ive already done some work on this but i
think it makes, better sense to pivot to the leaf code as you suggest. Ill
clean up what i have and save it for later.
Appreciate the guidance.

On Sat, Apr 18, 2026, 9:51 PM John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
>
> On Apr 18, 2026, at 16:39, <russ.gorby at gmail.com> <russ.gorby at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I was planning to convert this library next but I’m concerned about the
> review burden. It has 77 C code files and about the same number of header
> files.
> Is there better approach than doing everything all at once?
> I’m resistant to doing a subset of .c files because I want to identify .h
> files in the target that can transition to .hpp files based on where they
> are included from and doing subset chunks could reduce the set that can
> transition during this effort.
> All I can think of is do minimal conversion first and then the deeper
> convert as phase 2.
> Thank you for your opinions.
> -russ
>
>
> It actually has 71 C files, 74 C headers, 6 C++ files and 2 C++ headers.
>
> Most of gnome-utils is used by gnome and register, so very few of the
> header files will be convertible until those other directories are
> converted too. Also nearly everything in there is derived from Gtk classes
> so even once you have it all compiling in C++ you’re still stuck with the
> GObject lifetime and memory models. So not only would converting all 71
> files in a single PR be unpleasant to review, it’s going to take a lot
> longer than a single PR should. You really need to chunk it. There are some
> logical chunks: All of the tree-models (8 C files) would be a good one, and
> the 7 tree-views a complementary second chunk. There are 13 dialog files
> that could be jammed into a single PR but might be more comfortable in 2.
>
> You might also consider going downstream instead: register is already
> broken into 3 directories with 14-17 C files each and it’s nearly all leaf
> code, meaning that very little depends on it so you’ll be able to convert
> more headers and need to have C linkage on fewer functions. gnome is 40 C
> files and again is more leaf code than is gnome-utils, but it still
> interacts strongly with Gtk so there’s less opportunity for converting
> headers or using C++ linkage.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>
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