Description GObject is the fundamental type providing the common attributes and methods for all object types in GTK+, Pango and other libraries based on GObject. The GObject class provides methods for object construction and destruction, property access methods, and signal support. Signals are described in detail in Signals(3). GInitiallyUnowned is derived from GObject. The only difference between the two is that the initial reference of a GInitiallyUnowned is flagged as a floating reference. This means that it is not specifically claimed to be "owned" by any code portion. The main motivation for providing floating references is C convenience. In particular, it allows code to be written as: If container_add_child() will g_object_ref_sink() the passed in child, no reference of the newly created child is leaked. Without floating references, container_add_child() can only g_object_ref() the new child, so to implement this code without reference leaks, it would have to be written as: The floating reference can be converted into an ordinary reference by calling g_object_ref_sink(). For already sunken objects (objects that don't have a floating reference anymore), g_object_ref_sink() is equivalent to g_object_ref() and returns a new reference. Since floating references are useful almost exclusively for C convenience, language bindings that provide automated reference and memory ownership maintenance (such as smart pointers or garbage collection) therefore don't need to expose floating references in their API. Some object implementations may need to save an objects floating state across certain code portions (an example is GtkMenu), to achive this, the following sequence can be used: