We are pleased to announce version 0.3.3 of Vala, a compiler for the GObject type system.
Vala 0.3.3 is now available for download at: http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.3/ Changes since 0.3.2 * Support overriding default method handlers of signals. * Support dynamic access to properties and signals of GObjects. * Experimental support for nullable value types. * Improve support for classes not deriving from GLib.Object. * Support """verbatim strings""". * Add parser for Genie (Jamie McCracken) * Experimental support for arrays of arrays. * Documentation improvements (Phil Housley) * Improvements to D-Bus support (Ali Sabil, Philip Van Hoof, Yu Feng) * Add libepc-1.0 bindings (Ali Sabil) * Add libtiff bindings (Christian Meyer) * Updates to the GStreamer bindings (Ali Sabil and Jaap A. Haitsma) * Many bug fixes and performance improvements. 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 * 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. 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 bindings for current versions of GLib, GTK+, and many more. 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 _______________________________________________ Vala-list mailing list Vala-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
