[gtkada] Heap corruption and other problems

[Emmanuel Briot]

> 1. It seems that Gtk3 up to version 3.8 (Glib 2.36) has serious problem
> which corrupts Ada's memory pool sooner or later. The bug is sporadic and I
> cannot track it down, especially without building Glib from sources, which
> is a problem itself.

I don't think we have seen that one ourselves. What is the symptom, a Storage_Error
or something that could help recognize it better ?
Are you able to run your application in valgrind, maybe there is a bug that can be found
much earlier than waiting for the memory corruption...

> 2. Another serious problem is in GDK which shows itself as:
> 
>   Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_device_get_source: assertion `GDK_IS_DEVICE
> (device)' failed
> 
> on many occasions. E.g. in combo boxes after resizing them.

We have seen that one at some point, but it is gone in the development
versions now. I think it is part of our own patches to gtk+, did you apply these ?
They are in the contrib/ directory (of course, that's in case you recompile your
own gtk+, I don't remember what system you are working on).

> So far Gtk3 looks barely usable for any serious application. Sorry for all
> efforts AdaCore spent on GtkAda.

We do use it very successfully for the upcoming version of GPS in fact. The
transition is indeed somewhat painful, but then things seem to work as expected
for us. Of course, we may have made progress or fixes since the last GPL release.

Emmanuel