Re: [Vala] Hi, Is Vala what I am looking for?

[Jamie McCracken <jamie mccrack googlemail com>]

On Wed, 2009-09-23 at 11:24 -0400, "Andrés G. Aragoneses" wrote:
> Jiří Zárevúcky wrote:
> > On 09/21/2009 10:52 PM, "Andrés G. Aragoneses" wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > Of course, what I'm talking about is about adding one more user choice,
> > > not "removal of Mono" like the subject of the original thread is named
> > > (especially if you consider that I work for Novell on some Mono class
> > > libraries ;) ). At last, what you could say is "removal of Mono runtime"
> > > if we want to refer to this topic.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > >
> > >     Andres
> > >
> > >    
> >
> > You can't compile C# code with what Vala uses. It just wouldn't work.
> > Ever. C# code is *designed* to work under GC and by replacing Mono with
> > something different you achieve nothing. I can't believe people still
> > bring up such topics.
>
> Hey Jiri,
>
> (Short question: with "ever", do you mean even contributing patches to
> the Vala Project?)
>
> Longer questions:  many thanks for your input. Sorry but it's the first
> time I see someone mentioning that C# is *designed* to work under GC. I
> mean, of course I knew it was, but I didn't know that meant for sure
> that it cannot ever work with a reference counting approach. Can you
> tell me the exact bits of the C# grammar that would disallow this? I
> mean, what's the fundamental difference between Vala language and C#
> language (note I'm not talking about runtimes here) in respect to GC?
> Let me guess for a sec: are the keywords "owned" and "unowned" related?

GC requires finalization of non-memory resources (like file handles) so
this is an added burden for the programmer for delayed GC. C# is
designed like java for this

Vala code obviously has no need for finalization as resources are freed
when the object is freed as soon as it goes out of scope

that would be the biggest difference between GC and ref counting
languages

jamie