>> What is the current state of interaction between Vala and Mono? I mean, >> would it be possible to take a useful Mono library, rewrite it in Vala, >> and make the Mono programs pretty much transparently use the rewrite >> instead of the original library?
Since Vala libraries provide a C api, they would all be easily accessible from e.g. C#. In fact, an early iteration of the Vala addin for MonoDevelop was directly using libvala to derive context-sensitive completion data. > There are tools to automatically create a managed wrapper for > GObject-based library, so yes, it would be possible. Although I'm not > sure how eager would Mono programmers be to use such wrapped version. > Wrapped native code is generally slower and more difficult to work > with then a pure CIL implementation. The library in question would be > more likely to exist in two separately maintained versions. Many applications that run on Mono already use managed wrappers on native gobject libraries, a prime example being gtk+. Debian users, `apt-cache rdepends libgtk2.0-cil` to see a few. The gobject api generation works similarly to the vapi generation for Vala, in that it mainly Just Works and tends to require a few tweaks to fix things that don't get automagicked correctly or to take advantage of language features. >> If that is the case, I'd call such a rewrite a gain for the GNOME platform >> as a whole, since it would make a previously Mono-only library available to >> all the languages in the platform. I agree that creating a general-purpose library that doesn't expose a C api is annoying and moderately selfish. Coincidentally (considering the context of this thread), I see that actually happening much more often with python and ruby than I do with mono. Given that such a library exists, is it worthwhile to rewrite it in C or Vala? I'm not convinced that the answer is always (or even often) yes. A rewrite is even worse than a fork in terms of waste, and given that any nontrivial software is the product of thousands of person-hours, there had better be several extremely good reasons. -- http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/EconomyOfIdeas.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html _______________________________________________ Vala-list mailing list Vala-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
