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I read a wikipedia page on gobject where it says,

Depending only on GLib and libc, GObject is a cornerstone of GNOME and is used throughout GTK, Pango, ATK

but this GLib API reference page lists GObject in its dependencies and this GObject API reference page lists GLib in its dependencies

If what said on wikipedia page is true, How are they in each others dependencies? shouldn't it be only present under GObject's dependencies and not under GLib dependencies?

I'm confused about what depends on what or is it the case that they both depend on each other? if yes, how?

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  • Before you understand your Question, you need to understand what GLIB and GObject are and how they are related together. Any way, you are also partially answering yourself to your Question. You should read more about Type System Concepts Commented Feb 12, 2022 at 13:22

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This is a quirk of the documentation website: it currently conflates dependencies and related libraries. Since I'm maintaining both the tool that generates the documentation website and the website itself, I'll try and fix this as soon as I can.

To answer your question: the GLib project is composed by multiple C libraries:

  • GLib, a low level C library of useful data types and cross-platform API, useful when writing C code that needs to be portable to various platforms and architectures
  • GObject, an object oriented type system written in C
  • GIO, a set of interfaces and classes that provide, among other things, a complex set of primitives for accessing file systems and their contents; a low level networking interface; an IPC interface based on D-Bus; and various other high level API for writing complex applications
  • GModule, a cross-platform wrapper around loading shared modules at run time and resolving their symbols

All of these libraries are part of GLib.

On a lower level, the GLib C library sits below every other one, with GObject depending on GLib and GModule; and GIO depending on GObject.

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