[ANNOUNCE] Vala 0.5.4 - Compiler for the GObject type system

[news 28]

We are pleased to announce version 0.5.4 of Vala, a compiler for the

GObject type system.

 

Vala 0.5.4 is now available for download at:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.5/

 

Changes since 0.5.3

* Support array initializers as expressions.

* Support += to efficiently append elements to arrays.

* Calculate length for null-terminated arrays.

* Support initializers for multi-dimensional arrays.

* Add `owned' keyword to replace `#'.

* Various fixes in coroutine support.

* Support boxed structs as GObject properties.

* Many bug fixes.

 

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.

 

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

* Generics

* Non-null types

* Assisted memory management

* Exception handling

 

Vala is designed to allow access to existing C libraries, especially

GObject-based libraries, without the need for runtime bindings. All that

is needed to use a library with Vala is an API file, containing the class

and method declarations in Vala syntax. Vala currently comes with

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.

 

More information about Vala is available at

 

http://live.gnome.org/Vala

 

 

The Vala Team

 

Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini

 

 

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