Re: [Vala] [ANNOUNCE] Vala 0.5.4 - Compiler for the GObject type system

["Nicolas Joseph" <gege2061 gmail com>]

The win32 installer: http://code.google.com/p/valide/downloads/detail?name=vala-0.5.4.exe

2009/1/7 Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>

We are pleased to announce version 0.5.4 of Vala, a compiler for the
GObject type system.

Vala 0.5.4 is now available for download at:
  http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.5/

Changes since 0.5.3
 * Support array initializers as expressions.
 * Support += to efficiently append elements to arrays.
 * Calculate length for null-terminated arrays.
 * Support initializers for multi-dimensional arrays.
 * Add `owned' keyword to replace `#'.
 * Various fixes in coroutine support.
 * Support boxed structs as GObject properties.
 * Many bug fixes.

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming
language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional
runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to
applications and libraries written in C.

valac, the Vala compiler, is a self-hosting compiler that translates
Vala source code into C source and header files. It uses the GObject
type system to create classes and interfaces declared in the Vala source
code.

The syntax of Vala is similar to C#, modified to better fit the GObject
type system. Vala supports modern language features as the following:

       * Interfaces
       * Properties
       * Signals
       * Foreach
       * Lambda expressions
       * Type inference for local variables
       * Generics
       * Non-null types
       * Assisted memory management
       * Exception handling

Vala is designed to allow access to existing C libraries, especially
GObject-based libraries, without the need for runtime bindings. All that
is needed to use a library with Vala is an API file, containing the class
and method declarations in Vala syntax. Vala currently comes with
bindings for GLib and GTK+. It's planned to provide generated bindings for
the full GNOME Platform at a later stage.

Using classes and methods written in Vala from an application written in
C is not difficult. The Vala library only has to install the generated
header files and C applications may then access the GObject-based API of
the Vala library as usual. It should also be easily possible to write a
bindings generator for access to Vala libraries from applications
written in e.g. C# as the Vala parser is written as a library, so that
all compile-time information is available when generating a binding.

More information about Vala is available at

       http://live.gnome.org/Vala


The Vala Team

       Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini


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-- 
Nicolas Joseph

Responsable de la rubrique GTK+ de developpez.com /
In charge of the GTK+ section on developpez.com

http://nicolasj.developpez.com