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

[Juerg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

Hi Leonardo,

On Son, 2006-08-06 at 06:09 -0500, Leonardo Boshell wrote:
> 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.

Thanks, nice to hear that you're interested.

> * 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.

No, we aren't working on this yet. I will first write documentation for
the language Vala itself as there is no workaround for getting
information like there is with translating the documentation of C
libraries.

Thanks for your offer to help, we definitively need an agreement on how
to address documentation of library bindings. Reusing as much original
documentation as possible is probably the only way to get it done in an
acceptable amount of time. It should also be machine-readable to make it
possible to easily integrate it with a code completion feature of a
source editor. Please post your ideas to the list, so we can discuss
them.

> * A features roadmap?

I've added a rough roadmap to the project page, hope that helps.

> Now, some simple questions about vala:
>
> * What does the "!" in string! mean? Does it only apply to the string
> type?

The '!' marks a method parameter as non-nullable; it's not specific to
strings, it may be used with any reference type parameter. The only
thing it currently does is checking whether the passed argument is not
null at the beginning of the method. It may be used for more (warning of
possible null pointer dereferencing) later on.


> * 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?

Yes, we will probably add a Import attribute to Vala. Writing a VAPI
file is not any more difficult than using DllImport, though, you just
have to use a separate source file and use a local --vapidir and --pkg
option.

Jürg
-- 
Juerg Billeter <j bitron ch>