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gspell FAQ
==========
Differences between gspell and GtkSpell
---------------------------------------
- gspell has more features and unit tests.
- For the inline GtkTextView spell-checker, GtkSpell checks the whole
GtkTextBuffer at once (in one main loop iteration), which can freeze the UI if
the buffer contains a lot of text. On the other hand, gspell checks the buffer
chunk by chunk (in several main loop iterations). A copy of the
GtkSourceRegion utility (from the GtkSourceView project) is used to keep track
of the regions already spell-checked. That way, gspell also checks only the
visible regions of the GtkTextBuffer (only the text currently displayed in a
GtkTextView).
- Different API. gspell has more classes.
Why a separate library?
-----------------------
The non-GUI parts of gspell could be implemented in GIO, with an extension
point to not hard-depend on Enchant. And the GUI parts could be implemented in
GTK.
gspell has been created as a separate library for several reasons:
- To be able to iterate on the API more freely. gspell has now a stable API, but
it's still possible to create new major versions that are installable in
parallel and that have a different API. On the other hand, GIO is currently
stuck at version 2, the only possibility there is to deprecate an old API and
create a new one.
- A project to integrate spell-checking into GIO and GTK would have taken more
time.
- Having all the spell-checking-related code in one repository. The gspell
module currently contains 14k lines of code, with the biggest `*.c` file
containing 1400 lines. It's already a good size. In general, a small module is
easier to work with and to reason about the correctness of the code. On that
matter, see also the first chapter of “Large-Scale C++ Volume I: Process and
Architecture” (John Lakos).
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