Guile GI

This is a library for GNU Guile to create language bindings via GObject Introspection.

GNU Guile is an implementation of Scheme, which is a Lisp-like language. This library allows Guile to use GObject-based libraries -- such as GTK+3, GLib, and WebKit2 -- by generating a Scheme API from the GObject Introspection information provided by those libraries.

This is beta code. It is only partially documented. The API is stabilizing, but may still be subject to change.

Guile GI has two primary components.

• The gi scheme modules: guile modules that provide functionality to dynamically generate Scheme API from GObject typelib files

• libguile-gi.so or libguile-gi.dll: a compiled module that contains glue code to interface with GObject

To create bindings, use the use-typelibs syntax found in the (gi) library.

Requirements

To build guile-gi, one needs a fairly standard build environment, plus the development files for GObject Introspection and Guile. On Debian-based systems, this translates to

build-essential libgirepository1.0-dev guile-3.0-dev

It is also possible to build Guile-GI for Guile 2.2, in which guile-3.0-dev is to be replaced by guile-2.2-dev.

When building from a git clone rather than a release tarball, Texinfo is required as well in order to build documentation.

Users of GNU Guix can set up development environments through the provided guix.scm.

Running from source

To run one of the examples or your own code with Guile-GI built directly from source, use tools/uninstalled-env. For example

$ tools/uninstalled-env tools/run-guile examples/browser.scm

Testing

In order to test Guile-GI itself, only the requirements above are necessary. Some tests further rely on the GObject Introspection files of certain libraries. To run the full suite, you need

• GLib, GObject, Gio
• Marshall, Everything (should come with gobject-instrospection)
• Gtk
• Grl (grilo)

Users of GNU Guix will have to pass the --with-gir-hacks option to ./configure; it will cause Guile-GI to build typelibs for the versions of its dependencies, that are actually found in the build environment.

Documentation

Further documentation is located at spk121.github.io/guile-gi.