Vala 0.0.5 review

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any a

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 891K Developer: Jurg Billeter

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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.

Here are some key features of "Vala":
Interfaces
Properties
Signals
Foreach
Lambda expressions
Type inference for local variables
Generics [PLANNED]
Non-null types [PARTIAL]
Assisted memory management
Exception handling [PLANNED]

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 incomplete 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.

What's New in This Release:
Support base access.
Support typeof expressions.
Improve array support.
Fix possible memory leak in foreach statements.
Fix many warnings during C compilation.
Improve GTK+ bindings.