Re: [Vala] Vala++

[Al Thomas <astavale yahoo co uk>]

> From: Alessandro Pellizzari <alex amiran it>> Sent: Tuesday, 4 April 2017, 13:47
> Subject: Re: [Vala] Vala++

> On 04/04/17 13:28, Al Thomas via vala-list wrote:

> > You seem to over talking Rust and under talking Vala.
> No, I don't. :)
> Rust is a hard beast to learn. It took me months to have a decent grasp 
> of it, and I'm still missing many "rustic ways" of doing things, while 
> in Vala I was productive in weeks.

May be that's why Rust is still labelled a systems programming language.
So it's in the same application space as Erlang. Vala is a lot more
fun and gives people who are not systems and software engineers the
opportunity to express their ideas. Although Vala has and needs all
levels of abilities.

> But, on the other side: no memory leaks, no segmentation faults, no 
> concurrency mess-ups (unless you try VERY hard).

Vala is pretty good on this, but hopefully you took a little bit of
your time and reported the problem you had with Vala. Just as Rust
users do:
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/4494

Also Vala links to libraries that may cause such problems. I'm not
sure how Rust deals with that. I found this in the Rust docs:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ffi.html#ffi-and-panics
but that says "Please note that catch_unwind() will only catch
unwinding panics, not those who abort the process."

Is there a lot of wrapping? The initialisation of GTK uses wrapping
in the example:


> What I'm saying is exactly what you said: Rust has many more resources. 
> It's growing much faster (it is not even 2 years old).

I guess that must be a typo. Looks like the first commit was back on

16 June 2010:
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/c01efc669f09508b55eced32d3c88702578a7c3e
Or maybe you mean from the 1.0 release. Looks like that was 15 May 2015:
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/RELEASES.md#version-100-2015-05-15
So yes, five years from first commit to 1.0 release is pretty good.

> Inevitably, in a couple of years, it will be ahead of Vala even in Gtk/Gnome 

> support, unless hundreds of developers adopt Vala now.