On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 1:03 PM, oliver <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello, > > > I looked at the introduction on Vala > (just skimmed it). > > There it's written: > > - Programs written in Vala should have broadly similar performance to > those > written directly in C, whilst being easier and faster to write and > maintain. > > - A Vala application can do nothing that a C equivalent cannot. Whilst > Vala > introduces a lot of language features that are not available in C, these > are > all mapped to C constructs, although they are often ones that are > difficult > or too time consuming to write directly. > > Both sound very interesting. > It looks like using C for speed then will not be necessarily. > > Can the shotwell programmers confirm/affirm the above two statements? > Hi Oliver, Yes, those two statements are absolutely true. Vala looks like Java or C#, but it doesn't require any special runtime and it doesn't have a mark-and-sweep garbage collector. It uses refcounting for memory management, and Vala source is compiled to C (valac is technically a source compiler) so your program or library inter-operates very well with C. Of course, Vala isn't 100% optimal in all cases. A good analog is hand-coded assembly vs. a C program. Sure, you could spend many hours tweaking your assembly code to be perfect, or you could just write it in C and take a negligible performance hit. Same goes for Vala vs. C. Hope that helps! - Eric _______________________________________________ Shotwell mailing list [email protected] http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
