vala src 4a209960fd7ccd82a13c1c4987f92f524ed66e48df11aba45628746b512de37a Compiler for the GObject type system Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C. valac, the Vala compiler, is a self-hosting compiler that translates Vala source code into C source and header files. It uses the GObject type system to create classes and interfaces declared in the Vala source code. It's also planned to generate GIDL files when gobject-introspection is ready. The syntax of Vala is similar to C#, modified to better fit the GObject type system. Vala supports modern language features as the following: * Interfaces * Properties * Signals * Foreach * Lambda expressions * Type inference for local variables * Non-null types [PARTIAL] * Exception handling [PLANNED] * Assisted memory management * type modules (aka. Plugins) Vala is designed to allow access to existing C libraries, especially GObject-based libraries, without the need for runtime bindings. Each to be used library requires a Vala API file at compile-time, containing the class and method declarations in Vala syntax. Vala currently comes with experimental bindings for GLib and GTK+. It's planned to provide generated bindings for the full GNOME Platform at a later stage. Using classes and methods written in Vala from an application written in C is not difficult. The Vala library only has to install the generated header files and C applications may then access the GObject-based API of the Vala library as usual. It should also be easily possible to write a bindings generator for access to Vala libraries from applications written in e.g. C# as the Vala parser is written as a library, so that all compile-time information is available when generating a binding. angrypenguin <angrypenguinpoland@gmail.com> https://live.gnome.org/Vala