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The GObject system for all it's faults serves a purpose. Similar to COM in Windows it allows mapping of higher level languages to libraries. Without it there wouldn't be all the bindings we have to Python, JavaScript, Vala and Rust today. I wouldn't say it was poorly thought out so much as mismatched with it's user's typical uses and expectations.

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Yeah but it made literally zero sense to write GObject in C. They've reimplemented inheritance and the like with macro BS while the GNU project literally had both a C++ and Objective-C compiler - Objective-C warts and all was a perfect fit for GObject.

It makes sense if you consider that it was created for making c libraries bindable to higher level languages. That's more a flaw in it's design rather than implementation. If they were to design such a system now I'd hope it would be designed as a language independent ABI, Runtime and IDL like the Wasm Component Model.

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