Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Sun, 2013-09-08 at 14:22 +0800, Tal Liron wrote:
> After some thinking, I want to make this suggestion: Jamie, or anyone 
> else, would it be possible to write a tool to translate Genie files to 
> Vala? I imagine this would not be too hard with the current Genie parser 
> code. This would allow those of us who invested a lot in Genie an easy 
> transition into the mainline. We would just say that Genie was a brave, 
> terrific experiment that ultimately failed.

It wouldn't be extremely difficult to generate working Vala code. The
existing valac --dump-tree=foo.vala functionality is not very far away.
However, even if that was fixed to produce working Vala code, the
generated code wouldn't be ideal: everything in a single source file, no
code comments, lower level looping constructs and conditionals, extra
temporary variables, and maybe more.

I agree with Luca that it would be easier to improve the Genie parser.
It's written in Vala but it's not very difficult to make changes as it's
a handwritten parser. Copying a syntactic element from Vala may
sometimes be as simple as copying a method from valaparser.vala to
valagenieparser.vala.

The Vala parser is not being modified frequently these days (two commits
this year so far), so it wouldn't require a big effort to stay in sync.
If you'd like to continue using Genie, I'd suggest to consider working a
bit on the Genie parser yourself.

Regards,
Jürg