Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie

[Landon Blake <sunburned surveyor gmail com>]

I have some interest in making small improvements to Genie. I've been
wanting to learn more Vala programming...and Genie seems like a great
little language. I think this might be a cool project. (I think both Genie
and Vala are important for to make Gnome programming more accessible to
more programmers.)

I'd obviously would need to start by looking at the Vala source code files
for Genie. I'm a little confused at how Genie works. I read on the Genie
web page that it compiles down to byte code like Vala, yet it is written in
Vala. That makes me think it would work more like an interpreted language
than a compiled one...but I could be missing something obvious.

I do know a bit about parsing, and have written some fairly gnarly parsers
before.

Jamie was mentioned earlier in this thread as the current maintainer for
Genie. Is Jamie still around to answer questions?

Still chewing this project over...and wondering how hard it will be to dive
in and understand the existing Vala code that makes Genie work.

I'd hate to see it abandoned for lack of interest.

Landon


On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 1:02 AM, Tal Liron <tal liron gmail com> wrote:

> Thank you for your suggestion, but I don't have time to support yet
> another free software project at the moment. (A contribute to and manage
> over 20 projects.) My contributions have been in promoting Genie by giving
> talks about it, as well as opening many bugs. I'm willing to help in
> testing bug fixes.
>
> As for it being "not very difficult", I'm delighted to hear that, but
> unfortunately it does seems difficult, not in terms of programming, but in
> terms of project management. But we've had serious bugs languishing for
> more than a year, and there's no clear plan to fix them or continue
> supporting Genie in the future.
>
> I'm dismayed by the responses here. There's doesn't seem to be anyone
> taking leadership on this issue. For myself, I've decided to abandon Genie
> unless there is a major structural change in terms of managing it. I will
> now need to do the hard work of converting my Genie projects to Vala. :(
>
>
> On 09/08/2013 03:48 PM, Jürg Billeter wrote:
>
> > 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
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