Re: [Vala] Bring vala to AIX?

[Yu Feng <rainwoodman gmail com>]

On Sat, 2008-05-17 at 02:41 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> 2008/5/17 Yu Feng <rainwoodman gmail com>:
>         Dear All,
>         
>         Any one has any experience to build vala on an AIX?
>
> Hi Yu,
> Have you actually tried yourself? I'm sure that pretty much none in
> the Vala has access to an AIX host.
> I can't see any reason for it not to build as long as GLib is ported
> to AIX.

I tried today. AIX only have GLib 2.8; vala 0.3.2 doesn't build, with an
error G_TYPE_GTYPE not found(after I manually change the minimum
GLIB_VERSION from 2.12 to 2.8)

Is there an older version that can be built on GLib 2.8?
>         
>         I am thinking of (scripting) Vala in scientific computing.
>         After some
>         painful experience with ROOT.
>
> I'm not sure if I get the point here, Vala is not an scripting
> language. Can you clarify on this?

Yes, Vala is not an scripting language. Vala can be used in a similar
way as ROOT utilize C++ via CINT: 

Write an shell (let's call it valai )that 
(1) interprets vala statements, 
(2) access the GLib libraries with the help of the .vapi files.
(3) when the shell statements are compiled via valac, they become binary
libraries and can be accessed by valai.

The 3rd point is essential for a usable scientific computing toolkit.
Both ROOT and Matlab have it. If I can remember a couple of weeks ago
someone said he/she wrote an interpreter for vala 0.1.x .

The following are off the topic I should write a new mail.

The reference management and type deferment(eg, var x = new Someting())
in VALA is a good plus comparing with C++; the garbage
collection can be done in a library level.

The GTK library can be used to build the GUI part, e,g, an object
browser and a scientific canvas.

Yu


> Cheers,
> Alberto