Re: [Vala] C# Developer

[bernhard guillon begu org]

Hi all,
I am not sure which part of the thread to misuse but maybe we would be good to use something like 
bountysource or kickstarter to add feature wishes.

In my opinion the best way for now is to forget about performance and go the language server way. Manly 
because every IDE can share the code with it. Of course it is not perfect and of course some things will 
still be missing. But the good thing about using language server is that it is IDE independent and even 
language independent. Most IDE and editors nowadays support  language servers. And will continue to support 
them. A perfect IDE is just so far away that anything which will stay longer will be a good start. The 
language server can be extended for things which are not in the specification. But currently there is no Vala 
IDE which is anywhere near at the full feature set of the server specification. A specific IDE might die but 
I don't think that editors and IDE will stop to support the language server  support in the future.

After we are at the point that the compiler is the main problem as Christian Hergert  pointed out later in 
this thread. We can add bounties to enhance the compiler part. But for now I don't know any IDE for which 
this is the bottleneck?

So there are two servers right now that I know of:

https://github.com/benwaffle/vala-language-server

https://github.com/davidmhewitt/vala-language-server

But both are not easy to use right now. So in my opinion we should look at both of them and decide which one 
we want to support. Add bounties for different features and try to convince people and companies using Vala 
to pay a bit of money to get feature sets done.

benwaffle seams to be on this list so what do you think about it? I am not sure about davidmhewitt but I 
think he is on the elementary team which uses bountysources already?

Nice pro and cons for language-servers are listed at this blog post [1] from a gsoc attempt to add Rust 
support to Kdevelop.

Tarnyko pointed out that he might be willing to get paid to enhance Val(a)IDE. This is also a possible route.

Gnome builder crashes a lot on my system and I cannot get used to the way it works, most of the time it is 
not helping me but is in my way. Mainly because it does quite every thing exactly the other way around that I 
would do it. But the builder has also one of the best IDE support for Vala! So it might also be a good route.

What do you think which route we should follow?

We are a small community and it would be nice to bundle the efforts to get a nice IDE support :)

What the language server also not defines is how to get debugging support :/ So this part is IDE/editor 
dependent. Maybe we can define some API or wrapper for how to call gdb from any IDE to fully support Vala? 
Next big thing would be to target embedded systems for which I use Vala most. No IDE that I know of has some 
run on target and debug that damn thing built in. I mostly use the command line for this.

My workflow for now is vscode + vala syntax highlight + valadoc + ack + command line + meson + gdb. I know 
all the tools well so I don't really miss an IDE but I would like to help to get it started.

Regards,
Bernhard

1 https://perplexinglyemma.blogspot.com/2017/06/language-servers-and-ides.html

wolfgang mauer kabelmail de wrote on 09.10.2018 18:04:

> Maybe the wrong mailing-list ...
>
> First of all, I think Vala is good and very performant.
>
> I would like to but can not...
> If a C# developer really (not only for fun) to change to Vala, then must
> necessarily be a valadevelop available!
> With completion and tooltips and and and.
> I have already tried a few, but all do not meet the expectations
> (Geany/Anjuta/builder)
>
> The already existing tools are nice, but that's not enough.
> What happened to the project Valaide?
> In C# you can easily call C methods to improve performance. mono have a C
> bridge in both directions..
>
> I mean, certainly other C# developers too, that to develop seriously their own
> "valadevelop" must be available.
>
> Greetings
> Wolfgang
>
>
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