Re: [Vala] Vala Digest, Vol 1, Issue 3

["Cayle Graumann" <cayle graumann gmail com>]

Interesting project so far...   Like Everaldo earlier, I am interested in using vala to program the Nokia 770.   It would be nice to have a little more documentation, but I realize this project is in a very early stage.    I am an experienced java programmer, and since you said this language was close to C#, I have been catching up on my C# and my GObject reading.  Could you briefly list some of the syntactic differences between Vala and C#?  I know that C# doesn't have signals and callbacks are very different.  Earlier you explained about the 'construct' keyword, which was exceedingly helpful.        

I have been using the conversion of a simple graphics library in Java to Vala to experiment with the language.   

I have discovered a couple differences so far:  the keyword ' protected' ( it looks like only 'public' and 'private' are) is not supported, and nested namespaces are not supported.   Also if you specify a long constant like 32768L or 32768l, it will not compile as it thinks that is a variable or a label and not a long constant and complain about it.  Are all the GLib portable data types going to be supported?  Looking at the GLib interface, I see that the 64 bit integer types are supported, but the 32 bit types are not.  I ask because I have a whole lot of java int math to convert  ( Java's int's are standardized at 32 bits).  

If you're wondering why I don't just use Cairo to do the graphics and not bother to port another graphics library....  Cairo currently runs very poorly on the Nokia 770 because it is heavy with floating point math.  The poor Cairo performance is the number one reason why GTK+ is currently stuck at 
2.6  on the N770.

Anyway, keep up the good work.

Cayle
Missouri, USA