Re: [Vala] The future of Vala

["Dr. Michael Lauer" <mickey vanille de>]

Hi folks,

it’s great to see this discussion finally moving – albeit somewhat late.

With Luca leaving the project ([Vala] Leaving the project 
<https://mail.gnome.org/archives/vala-devel-list/2016-September/msg00000.html>), the situation is now even 
more
critical. Given that Joerg obviously has no time or interest it basically means that there
is no-one left who used to help developing the core language.

The bindings is another situation, those are quite vivid, from what I can see.

Some words on my personal situation: Although I have been inactive as well for
the past couple of years, I’m still willing to maintain the VAPIs I started or contributed a lot to
(i.e. linux, posix, alsa, netlink, etc.).
My pet project, the special-interest-middleware FSO – freesmartphone.org <http://freesmartphone.org/> – is 
very dependent
on Vala, I guess it is among the top 10 largest Vala projects and during the development I helped
Joerg getting a number of great Vala features in a solid state, such as coroutines, closures, async dbus, etc.
Alas, my knowledge of the compiler internals is zero. One reason why FSO has been stalling is that I'm unsure
about whether Vala is going anywhere towards a stable (with reasonably sane criteria of stableness) 1.0.

I’m also the creator of numerous bug entries where Vala generates invalid C code and the Vala programmer
is scared with an incomprehensible gcc error message. As far as I can see many of those are still open for a
bunch of years now – which makes me feel somewhat pessimistic about the future of Vala.

I’d welcome advise from the father of Vala, Joerg (or anyone other with solid knowledge of the core),
to give us some direction. Would a redesign / rewrite be necessary to move forward to an 1.0 or
would refactoring the compiler be enough to lower the contribution barrier?

Best regards,

:M: