[ANNOUNCE] Vala 0.5.6 - Compiler for the GObject type system

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

We are pleased to announce version 0.5.6 of Vala, a compiler for the
GObject type system.

Vala 0.5.6 is now available for download at:
   http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.5/

Changes since 0.5.5
 * Do not require libgee for custom indexer access.
 * Add Log.FILE, Log.LINE, and Log.METHOD constants.
 * Various improvements to the .gir reader.
 * Add Lua bindings (pancake and Phil Housley).
 * Add MySQL bindings (Jukka-Pekka Iivonen).
 * Add partial POSIX 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. 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