Re: Opinions on Vala.

["Alexandre Moreira" <alexandream gmail com>]

Resending, since I made a mistake and replied only to Sergei, sorry.


----- Original message coming below this -----


Answering both Sergei Steshenko and Paul Davis with this message...


On 3/3/07, Sergei Steshenko <sergstesh yahoo com> wrote:
> And how does it practically differ from, say, gtk2-perl ?

It differs from gtk2-perl (and Gtkmm for that matter) in the sense
that it needs no additional runtime to the application, it doesn't
even need Vala for source distribution if you decide you don't think
your users need it.

It is a sort of intermediary compiler: it takes code written on a
fairly simple (althought much more complex than C) and easy (a great
deal easier than C) language (based on C Sharp) and compiles it into
C-with-GObject code, which can then be compiled, distributed,
whatever.

It has its problems, mostly being you either have to mix C with Vala
code in a file to interface with libraries not yet supported or not
GObject based or you can write some Vala definitions to help the
compile translate vala syntax into C using those other libs.

But at the very least, it is a great competitor to the GOB2 object
builder and it creates a rather clean set of generated files. I didn't
extensively check it but it has some nice features.

The one I really like is the ability to treat Signals much like
delegates in C# But I really haven't seen much more than they wiki and
some sample codes, so I am not a reliable source of information about
it.

Right now I'm considering it to use as a tool to move from a lot of
UML diagrams I wrote on the course of last weeks to a set of classes
and then working my way back in C, just to avoid having that great
amount of boilerplate code hand typed (I am really short on time to
work on this project, so I every speed gain is a big gain). But I know
some (few) projects which were actually fully written in vala, and a
nice example is scratchpad[1], which was a Mono project later ported
to Vala to run natively using only the C runtime for
GObject/Glib/Gtk+.

> Regards,
>   Sergei.
>
> P.S. I guess you meant
>
> http://vala.paldo.org/

Thanks for the correction, I was in a hurry and forgot to add the link
to the reference I wrote :) That was really embarrassing hehe. This is
the link I was referring to.
> .
>
> --- Alexandre Moreira <alexandream gmail com> wrote:
[ ... snip my own message ... ]