[Vala] The future of Vala

[Timm Bäder <mail baedert org>]

Hey,

this is probably just a mail for Jürg and maybe Luca, but if you have a
relevant opinion on the matter, that might be a fine reply as well.

So, for quite a while the Vala project has seen very little activity.
The three people most involved (Jürg, Luca and Flo) are barely on IRC
and/or otherwise reachable which makes it hard to get an opinion or info
from them. On the other hand, some people are still doing a great job,
namely Rico with all the binding work, as well as Evan (I haven't kept
up with what Al is doing other than replying to bugzilla issues that
won't be fixed unless it's a binding issue).

Lots of people are worried about how the project will stay alive (or
if), and quite a lot of projects are written in Vala (including one I
maintain) -- and people keep porting projects from C to Vala, mostly
hoping for more contributions, hoping the Vala's C#-like syntax scares
off less people.

Now, we all know that Vala has enough bugs that need to get fixed, as
well as lots of potential for improvements (I'll just disregard all the
wishes for special syntax for fringe features on IRC, that's not what
I'm talking about). Some of them are easy to fix but even if the patches
are present in bugzilla and their author is willing to fix them after
a review, the review just never happens. This doesn't just cause those
bugs to stay unfixed, but those people will also never get accustomed
to the internals of valac and so they will never work on anything more
important than this simple fix.

I have tried in the past to do exactly that and post some patches for
simple fixes to get an understanding of valac internals but it's quite
frankly huge and there's not a real high-level documentation one could
work with (apart from a few very old blog posts form Luca) and neither
working tools do debug it (I've once spent a few hours on fixing valag
but then gave up...).


So... what's the deal here? Is there any way forward one could look
into? Is it wip/transform? IIRC there was some dbus stuff broken here?
Are there any TODO items for cleaning up the compiler? Should we just
tell people to not use Vala in the first place (which would be better
for the in the long run)? All of these are fine, but the current
situation not so much.


Sincerely,
Timm