Re: [Vala] Interfacing various languages

[pancake <pancake youterm com>]

I think that the most interest in making this is not because the c compiler is insufficient or the glib is a 
bad runtime.

Vala depends heavily on glib, not only because of the language design, but also in stuff like regex, class 
inheritance, etc.

Maybe we can focus in letting vapis interface with c++, objc or rust.

There are many c++ libraries out there and calling c++ from c is not possible, so it needs the code to 
compile against g++. But then we need to be able to construct c++ syntaxes for calling methods and 
instantiating classes.

The same applies to objc. In ios and osx, the system provides a full objc api which can be used from swift. 
But again, what i think that we need is a thin layer to allow sub-vala language to call c++ or objc code. 
Then we can use this wrapper code to interact with the vala code we already have.

That would be one approach, which doesnt solves all situations but it doesnt makes things much harder for the 
compiler.

> On 10 Nov 2014, at 00:19, Luca Bruno <lethalman88 gmail com> wrote:
>
> There's no need for a plan to make the compiler more generic. Anyway, there's a c++ branch in vala created 
> by me, and I had hard time mapping vala to c++ for two reasons:
> 1) Classes can be used as structs, even Qt does that fir Lists for example.
> 2) Templates cannot be easily mapped from vala generics to c++ templates, unless you specialize the class. 
> E.g. List<T> to List<string> and call that StringList in vala.
>
> The second point can be reworked to make vala a complete rewrite of c++ somehow, but wasn't my intention in 
> the branch. However the fist point is a real problem.
>
> If any of you has a project that maps vala to another language, and you feel the need for a more generic 
> interface of a particular component of vala, I'm willing to help with that.
>
> > On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 6:23 PM, pancake <pancake youterm com> wrote:
> > i think that before accepting patches we need a plan. We have to decide
> > if we want a subset of Vala, or just to define an interoperability API to
> > call other languages like C++, Java or ObjC.
> >
> > if the plan is to use it just with bindings one can use Valabind, which can
> > create JNA/JNI or C++ bindings from Vala code (still wip) and then just use
> > that api from Java or C++ code.
> >
> > But I would prefer to be able to call OBJC/C++ code from Vala. The emscripten
> > solution to that problem is quite elegant, so maybe we can use it as a way
> > to create formatted strings at compile time for the generated code. For example: