[Technology] Minimising copy and paste

I've spent much of the past two days discovering:

• GValue does not have a means of converting or transforming strings to other values.  I'll have to parse strings of doubles to actual doubles manually.


• Vala apparently does not like passing somestruct.somemethod as delegates into other functions (it complains that the struct is not a gconstpointer on the C side)


• Vala does not like generic values as parameters in delegates.


• You can't use a switch tree with GTypes as cases (e.g. case typeof (int64):)

The main reason is because after spending a week getting GXml working with the latest vala and gee and getting the serialisation prototype working on it, I would like to get rid of my massively ugly copy-paste if else tree.  The more I know.