[Vala] Class definitions

["Stephen Henry" <stephenry gmail com>]

Hi Guys,

Your doing a really great job with Vala. I'm quite new to the
technology, but there is one thing that I don't really like about it.
I don't really understand why it is necessary to manually specify that
classes derived from the Glib.GObject. To me, this just exposes too
much information about the underlying implementation. I feel that Glib
integration should be completely transparent to the user (well, as
much as can be reasonably expected) and GObjects should be first class
citizens in the language. I understand that there is the argument of
needing to have a lightweight equivalent to "struct", without the
overhead of GObject, but, isn't it the job of the compiler to
automatically optimise this operation, not the user? Can't it be the
case that all classes automatically inherit from GObject, but are then
optimised during compilation (code generation?) depending whether they
ever reference the GObject functionality?

Anyway, keep up the good work. I really see this as being the key
enabling technology to bringing GTK and GNOME platform to a wider
audience.

Stephen