Several useful developer tools have been build around GObject technology. Next sections briefly introduce them and link to the respective project pages. Writing gobjects can be a tedious task. It requires a lot of typing and just doing copy and paste needs care. On obvious idea is to use some sort of templates for the class skelletons. Then a tool could generate the real c files from them. GOB/ (or GOB2) is suc h a tool. It is a preprocessor for making GObjects with inline C code so that generated files are not edited. Syntax is inspired by Java and Yacc or Lex. The implementation is intentionally kept simple, and no C actual code parsing is done. The reference counting scheme used by GObject does solve quite a few memory management problems but also introduces new sources of bugs. In large applications, finding the exact spot where a the reference count of an Object is not properly handled can be very difficult. Hopefully, there exist at a too named refdbg/ which can be used to automate the task of tracking down the location of invalid code with regard to reference counting. This application intercepts the reference counting calls and tries to detect invalid behavior. It suports a filter-rule mechanism to let you trace only the objects you are interested in and it can be used together with gdb. The API documentation for most of the Glib, GObject, GTK+ and GNOME libraries is built with a combination of complex tools. Typically, the part of the documentation which describes the behavior of each function is extracted from the specially-formatted source code comments by a tool named gtk-doc which generates docbook xml and merges this docbook xml with a set of master xml docbook files. These xml docbook files are finally processed with xsltproc (a small program part of the libxslt library) to generate the final html output. Other tools can be used to generate pdf output from the source xml. The following code excerpt shows what these comments look like. /** * gtk_widget_freeze_child_notify: * @widget: a #GtkWidget * * Stops emission of "child-notify" signals on @widget. The signals are * queued until gtk_widget_thaw_child_notify() is called on @widget. * * This is the analogue of g_object_freeze_notify() for child properties. **/ void gtk_widget_freeze_child_notify (GtkWidget *widget) { ... The great thoroughful documentation on how to setup and use gtk-doc in your project is provided on the gnome developer website. gtk-doc generates