[Shotwell] Vala

[oliver]

Hi Eric,

On Sun, Aug 07, 2011 at 02:14:45PM -0700, Eric Gregory wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 1:03 PM, oliver <oliver at first.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> >
> > I looked at the introduction on Vala
> > (just skimmed it).
> >
> > There it's written:
> >
> >  - Programs written in Vala should have broadly similar performance to
> > those
> >    written directly in C, whilst being easier and faster to write and
> > maintain.
> >
> >  - A Vala application can do nothing that a C equivalent cannot. Whilst
> > Vala
> >    introduces a lot of language features that are not available in C, these
> > are
> >    all mapped to C constructs, although they are often ones that are
> > difficult
> >    or too time consuming to write directly.
> >
> > Both sound very interesting.
> > It looks like using C for speed then will not be necessarily.
> >
> > Can the shotwell programmers confirm/affirm the above two statements?
> >
> 
> Hi Oliver,
> 
> Yes, those two statements are absolutely true.  Vala looks like Java or C#,
> but it doesn't require any special runtime and it doesn't have a
> mark-and-sweep garbage collector. It uses refcounting for memory management,
> and Vala source is compiled to C (valac is technically a source compiler) so
> your program or library inter-operates very well with C.

Say, there is some C-Code that should be married with Vala,
is there an easy way to marry Vala and C?
This might be necessary to use some libraries, and have some
intermediate C code for that.
Or how could certain libraries with C-API be connected to Vala?


> 
> Of course, Vala isn't 100% optimal in all cases. A good analog is hand-coded
> assembly vs. a C program. Sure, you could spend many hours tweaking your
> assembly code to be perfect, or you could just write it in C and take a
> negligible performance hit. Same goes for Vala vs. C.
> 
> Hope that helps!

Yes, thanks.

Not sure if I will have the time to look at Vala in more depth.
But if so, I would do it with shotwell in mind (and as main motivation),
so that I maybe also could contribute some code.

Maybe one of the ideas I talked about (the distributed database-issue)...
(For which I did not got feedback so far).

Shotwell at laest seems to be a program that's worth looking at
Vala in more depth. It's already convincing.


Ciao,
   Oliver