And, before you ask: no, I didn't lose any bet. I used to contribute to the Perl bindings for GNOME, and even if I stopped writing Perl more than a decade ago, the finger memory is still there…

Oh wow :) We used to use perl-Gtk2 heavily at work (even as far as packaging a sort-of self-contained exe for Windows with ActivePerl), and it worked pretty well, considering :D

@phl perl-Gtk2 was pretty cool, all things considered; we made sure that the API looked and behaved like an idiomatic Perl module, even if meant writing a bunch of terrible XS code. These days, you can load the introspection data with 5 lines, and then write some native Perl to get a decent API out of the C API.

Ah yeah, gobject-introspection was Gtk3, wasn't it?

@phl Yeah, it was introduced at the tail end of GTK2, but GTK3 was the first library that adopted it in full