[Vala] Docs, roadmap and some other stuff..

[Leonardo Boshell <leonardo lists kmc com co>]

Hello,

First of all, thanks for sharing vala with the world. It looks like a
very nice project, and after having read the announcements, installing
vala and browsing through the source a little bit, I've got to say I'm
very excited about the possibilities that vala brings (and will bring)
for coders who enjoy the development framework and practises started by
the Gnome guys and their excellent libraries.

Now, there's some things that I'm curious about and since I haven't seen
much information about them in the project page, I'd like to ask them
here:

* Any work on the APIs documentation yet?

As you might expect, one of the things I'm most interested in at this
point is documentation. I've read somewhere in the mail archive that
you're planning on releasing docs later on, but I ask mostly because I'd
be interested in helping in this respect.

What I'd like to tackle first is providing documentation for the
bindings found under the 'vapi' directory, since I guess they would be
easier to begin with :). I already have some ideas on how to automatise
to some degree the creation of documentation skeletons (in docbook or
something like that), and since they are bindings of libraries that have
their own documentation, it would be a matter of "translating" that
documentation so all code examples and explanations are written in vala
instead of C.

So my question is, are you guys already working on this? I want to make
sure I don't duplicate any work and maybe cooperate with the
documentation effort as part of my learning experience.


* A features roadmap?

The list of features was the first thing that really got my attention
when I first read the vala announcement, and seeing the syntax for
things like signals, lambda expressions and generics (I guess not fully
implemented yet) in vala is very encouraging. After only two releases,
it's quite impressive the amount of things already present but of course
I'm already waiting to see the planned and incomplete features fully
working.

I'm not interested in knowing when exactly those things will be
implemented, but I'd certainly like to see a roadmap in the project
page, mentioning the milestones (if any). I'd like to know things like,
will there be a 0.1.0? 0.2.0? What would they include? What would have
to be in for a 1.0 release? Am I looking too far ahead?

Anyway, all of this is if you actually are interested in writing a
roadmap. No big deal :).


Now, some simple questions about vala:

* What does the "!" in string! mean? Does it only apply to the string
type?


* Will there be a more-or-less direct way to call C code inside from
vala?

In particular, let's say that there's some library written in C which
I'd like to use from vala, but there's not a "vapi" file written for it.
Would I need to write a binding for it? Maybe there will be something
like DllImports?


OK, that'll be all for now. Sorry for the long message.. :)


Thanks again, and keep up the good work,
Leonardo B.