Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie

[Tal Liron <tal liron gmail com>]

Landon,

Jamie has been doing a great job in responding to bugs in the last few 
days. He probably needed the jolt from this mailing list to realize 
that, yes, there is interest in Genie, and people are writing big things 
in it. I hope this trend will continue. Also, it seems that some of the 
issues that I reported a year ago have resolved themselves somehow. I'm 
feeling less alarmed and more hopeful now. I'm determined to continue 
using Genie and open bugs as I see them, knowing that someone on the 
other end will take them seriously and respond.

Very happy to have you join, I'm sure Jamie could use some help!

valac has been self-hosting for a while, meaning that it itself is 
written in Vala. This includes the parsers for Genie and Vala languages: 
both parse the language source code into the same data structure, which 
valac then outputs as C code. If you involve yourself in Genie, you 
would likely not have to deal with the C-code generation. All of Genie 
is really just a single .vala file. (It would be fairly easy to add 
other dialects to valac, too. Well, as long as the maintainer can make 
sure to keep the dialect up to date with the latest capabilities...)

As a convenience, valac can send all these generated C files to gcc, 
which does the actual compilation to binary. But valac is not itself a 
binary compiler. So, no, not quite an interpreted language, but also not 
a to-binary compiler. In a sense, it's a bit like some pre-processors 
for C/C++. It's really quite brilliant: all the advantages of C code, 
and many of the advantages of higher-level languages.

I have a large project that involves Genie, C and C++ together. C++ 
requires some special integration work, but otherwise everything works 
together wonderfully.

On 09/10/2013 12:00 PM, Landon Blake wrote:
> 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