Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie

[Evan Nemerson <evan coeus-group com>]

On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 21:00 -0700, 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'm not sure where you're looking, but that's not true.  Genie is
compiled by valac to C (just like Vala) which is then compiled by a C
compiler into native code.

Internally, Genie uses the same AST as Vala, which is why it is part of
the Vala project.  The AST is not what is used when executing the code—
it is merely an intermediate representation which is part of the
compiler.  If that's what made you think bytecode, you should read the
Wikipedia page on ASTs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree


-Evan