[Vala] Building upon Vala

["Vlad Grecescu" <b100dian gmail com>]

Hello Vala developers,

I am trying to write a different way of configuring Gtk widgets and containers, with XML tags and attributes, through gtkaml.
You can view this 'jargon' as an UI-oriented mode of (still) writing Vala code.

What am I doing now is that I extend Vala.Parser, process the *.gtkaml files myself then feed *.vala files in their place.
That is, text processing: given an XML, I am writing a text that represents a Vala source.

Two things:
1. I saw that starting with 0.3.x, Vala got a shiny new recursive descent parser (btw, excellent job!)
2. I noticed that vala is no longer a shared library

These two things concern me, in different ways, and I would like your opinion about them

The first thing is that it would be nice to be able to re-use portions of the parser. Instead of just exporting 
vala_parser_parse ()
vala_parser_parse_file ()
it would be nice if one could directly call:
vala_parser_parse_declaration ()
(just an example).

This would alow someone to create Vala (and eventually GObject) code with other mechanisms and also parse snippets of Vala code.


The second issue is that ever since libvala is no longer a shared library, I have to recompile gtkaml to match against it.
This, I think, would be an issue for any future editors equiped with code-completion et cetera. A much cleaner way would be to re-use the parsing part of a libvala-1.0.so/dll.
Tool support could depend on the first (parsing) issue too!

I really am interested in your opinion about these two things.

Regards,
Vlad Grecescu.