[ANNOUNCE] Vala 0.11.1 - Compiler for the GObject type system

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

We are pleased to announce version 0.11.1 of Vala, a compiler for the
GObject type system.

Vala 0.11.1 is now available for download at:
   http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.11/

This is a development release leading toward 0.12.

Changes since 0.11.0
 * Require and target GLib >= 2.16.
 * Guard access to out parameters to allow null arguments.
 * Add support for local constants.
 * Support file descriptor passing with GDBus.
 * Support cached property values in GDBus clients.
 * Support Cancellable parameter in GDBus clients.
 * Support no-reply methods in GDBus clients and servers.
 * More refactoring in the code generator.
 * Many bug fixes and binding updates.

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://www.vala-project.org/


Jürg Billeter