[ANNOUNCE] Vala 0.0.5 - Compiler for the GObject type system
- From: Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>
- To: vala paldo org
- Cc: gnome-announce-list gnome org
- Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Vala 0.0.5 - Compiler for the GObject type system
- Date: Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:56:16 +0100
We are pleased to announce version 0.0.5 of Vala, a compiler for the
GObject type system.
Changes since 0.0.4
* Support base access.
* Support typeof expressions.
* Improve array support.
* Fix possible memory leak in foreach statements.
* Fix many warnings during C compilation.
* Improve GTK+ bindings.
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. It's also planned to generate GIDL files when gobject-
introspection is ready.
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 [PLANNED]
* Non-null types [PARTIAL]
* Assisted memory management
* Exception handling [PLANNED]
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
experimental 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://vala.paldo.org/
The Vala Team
Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini
[
Date Prev][
Date Next] [
Thread Prev][
Thread Next]
[
Thread Index]
[
Date Index]
[
Author Index]