Re: Using vala in GNOME

[Callum McKenzie <callum spooky-possum org>]

Mathias Hasselmann wrote:

> Just that gob wasn't half as ambitious as Vala. gob took some kind of
> minimum effort approach which lead to the effect that you were mixing
> high-level gob and low-level C code all the time. This just felt flaky
> and hackish.

I used gob with gnome-games for a while (in exactly the same way that
Vala is proposed for Seahorse, but I didn't ask before-hand). Then I
stopped and converted the files back to ordinary C. The reason I did
this was not because of gob's hackish nature - it still achieved its
goal of being less work to write a gobject than plain C - but because of
its obscurity. At the end of the day, expecting people to learn a new
language just to contribute to the code-base was unreasonable.

Vala's advantages over gob are two-fold: a) it looks even more like
languages people are familiar with than gob does and b) it is being
promoted more heavily than gob ever was. I hope it does succeed, and
despite having a lot of sympathy for Bastien's wait-for-1.0 attitude, I
think it should be tried sooner rather than later, otherwise it will
suffer gob's fate.

As an aside: ultimately it will be necessary to move it from a hacking
dependency to a build dependency. Novice developers work from tarballs,
not SVN and you will get patches against your generated code appearing
in bugzilla.

 - Callum