Why is it that we in GNOME came to view GLib as the lowest level of our stack?

Forget, for the moment, about such small barbarisms as gint32, and even gint. Forget things like gnome-keyring versus GnuPG. Let us even pass over GObject as a whole. Today I had a thought that was new to me. Let's talk about DWARF.

DWARF describes ABIs. It is ubiquitous: it is on GNU systems as well as Mac and BSD, and could be on Windows if we put it there. It's extensible. It is mostly controlled by like-minded free software people.

So why is it that we invented GIR?

Discuss.