[ANNOUNCE] Vala 0.4.0 - Compiler for the GObject type system

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

We are pleased to announce version 0.4.0 of Vala, a compiler for the
GObject type system.

Vala 0.4.0 is now available for download at:
   http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.4/

Changes since 0.3.5
 * Support more flexible constructors.
 * Partial support for reading and writing .gir files.
 * Improve compiler performance.
 * Copy arrays where necessary.
 * Basic support for static properties.
 * Partial support for struct holding object references.
 * Add tracker indexer bindings (Roberto Majadas)
 * Updates to the GLib, GTK+, and GStreamer bindings.
 * Many bug fixes.

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming
language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional
runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to
applications and libraries written in C.

valac, the Vala compiler, is a self-hosting compiler that translates
Vala source code into C source and header files. It uses the GObject
type system to create classes and interfaces declared in the Vala source
code.

The syntax of Vala is similar to C#, modified to better fit the GObject
type system. Vala supports modern language features as the following:

        * Interfaces
        * Properties
        * Signals
        * Foreach
        * Lambda expressions
        * Type inference for local variables
        * Generics
        * Non-null types
        * Assisted memory management
        * Exception handling

Vala is designed to allow access to existing C libraries, especially
GObject-based libraries, without the need for runtime bindings. Each to
be used library requires a Vala API file at compile-time, containing the
class and method declarations in Vala syntax. Vala currently comes with
bindings for current versions of GLib, GTK+, and many more.

Using classes and methods written in Vala from an application written in
C is not difficult. The Vala library only has to install the generated
header files and C applications may then access the GObject-based API of
the Vala library as usual. It should also be easily possible to write a
bindings generator for access to Vala libraries from applications
written in e.g. C# as the Vala parser is written as a library, so that
all compile-time information is available when generating a binding.

More information about Vala is available at

        http://live.gnome.org/Vala


The Vala Team

        Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini