Re: [Vala] [ANNOUNCE] Vala 0.11.0 - Compiler for the GObject type system

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Tue, 2010-10-05 at 12:11 +0200, pancake wrote:
> > Changes since 0.10.0
> >   * Use byte indices for strings.
> by reading the patch I understand that this is not honoring UTF8 anymore?

No, strings in Vala are still UTF-8, nothing changed in that regard. The
difference is that indices/offsets/lengths are measured in code units
(bytes as we are talking about UTF-8) instead of code points.

This is in line with string APIs in many libraries (Java, .NET, Qt, Go)
and makes it possible to improve performance in string handling without
resorting to pointers all the time while still properly supporting
Unicode strings.

It may require changes in some code but most well-written code can
actually remain as it is.

> >   * Add support for parallel compilation.
> can't find any commit related to this. can you point to an example?

http://live.gnome.org/Vala/Documentation/ParallelBuilds

> >   * Improve compiler performance.
> any benchmarks?

From measurements some time ago, the valac CPU time for a rebuild of
libvala/valac itself was reduced from 16 seconds to 9 seconds. It really
depends on the application, though.

Jürg