Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie

[Luca Bruno <lethalman88 gmail com>]

On 10/09/2013 06:00, 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.

Your vision of Genie is quite complex :-) Forget about what you said.

This is how vala works: lexer -> parser -> analysis -> codegen.
Genie only has its own lexer and parser. It's just 3 files:
- https://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/tree/vala/valagenieparser.vala
- https://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/tree/vala/valageniescanner.vala
- https://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/tree/vala/valagenietokentype.vala

In other words, the only difference between Vala and Genie is the 
syntax, the semantics is the same for both Vala and Genie. The code is 
really really straightforward to understand.

Best regards,