[Vala] My first (very positive) impressions of Vala

[Serge Hulne <serge hulne gmail com>]

*My first (very positive) impressions of Vala

*

   1. Vala is very productive. I have written a custom-made scanner for
   processing text in the format which we use in our company.
      - The code is barely longer than the equivalent Python code, but much
      faster (Python in know to be concise and compact)
      2. The core of Vala (the glib2 and gee packages) is simple and
   efficient (does not require any particular IDE to code in Vala).
      - It is very easy to code with vim + ctags-vala
      3. Vala is fast
      - The generated C code is fast.
      4. Vala is not memory  greedy
      - The reference counting scheme seems to at least as fast than the
      resp. garbage collecting schemes of Go or D.
      5. The generated C code looks sane and smart.
      - Since Vala was conceived from  the ground up to generate C code from
      a higher level (object-oriented) language is seems to be able to do so
      efficiently (as opposed to compilers for Java (gcj) or python (shedskin) )
      - Compared to code generated by gcj or shedskin, the C code generated
      from Vala code is only about three times the size of the
original Vala code,
      and is human readable, it does not look too much like the usual
      automatically generated code (it not excessively huge or too generic or
      obscure).
      -  As mentioned above, therefore it is fast.
      6. Vala generates C : it therefore is a good choice for "extending"
   high-level languages,  (like : writing Python  or java extensions, e.g. via
   SWIG), without having to actually resort to writing directly C code)


*Suggestions for improvement:
*

   1. More examples (I intend to contribute actively to that aspect).
   2. Provide a way to generate the documentation locally (like Javadoc or
   Pydoc or godoc).
   - Valadoc does not seem (in its present form) to be able to generate the
      complete documentation of Vala, with one simple command.
      - I had to resort to get the documentation form the server with wget,
      for that reason (which I browse, from the command-line with lynx).
      - I tried Doxygen, but the result is not useful.
   3. Perhaps the entire Vala documentation, should be available a
   compressed file (to avoid having to get is with wget)

Serge Hulne.