Re: [Vala] [ANNOUNCE] Vala 0.5.3 - Compiler for the GObject type system

["Ali Sabil" <ali sabil gmail com>]

Congrats :) Another step forward toward world domination !

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 11:49 PM, Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch> wrote:

We are pleased to announce version 0.5.3 of Vala, a compiler for the
GObject type system.

Vala 0.5.3 is now available for download at:
  http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.5/

Changes since 0.5.2
 * Rewrite D-Bus server support to directly use libdbus.
 * Register structs as boxed types.
 * Improve error reporting on invalid code.
 * Support private class fields and class destructors.
 * Add partial raptor and rasqal bindings.
 * Drop vala-gen-project, moved to vtg.
 * 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. All that
is needed to use a library with Vala is an API file, containing the class
and method declarations in Vala syntax. Vala currently comes with
bindings for GLib and GTK+. It's planned to provide generated bindings for
the full GNOME Platform at a later stage.

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


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