We are pleased to announce version 0.7.4 of Vala, a compiler for the GObject type system.
Vala 0.7.4 is now available for download at: http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.7/ Changes since 0.7.3 * Add support for array properties. * Support implicit and explicit GValue casts. * Add initial support for generic methods. * Add postgres bindings. * Many bug fixes and binding updates. 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 Jürg Billeter _______________________________________________ Vala-list mailing list Vala-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
