[HN Gopher] The Vala Language (2017)
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The Vala Language (2017)
Author : goranmoomin
Score : 31 points
Date : 2024-08-17 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bassi.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bassi.io)
| comex wrote:
| (2017)
| treyd wrote:
| What's the state of Vala in 2024?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Seems to be still going. Doesn't seem to be very popular, which
| might turn to a competitive advantage for some.
| southwesterly wrote:
| ElementaryOS developers seem to use it.
| thesnide wrote:
| I remember to have high hopes in Vala when discovering it. But
| never actually felt the need to learn or use it for real.
|
| Which tells a story.
| silisili wrote:
| That's the same place I ended. A desktop environment does not
| need its own language, and it was kinda hubris to think people
| would do that.
|
| What's also interesting is that in Gnome 3, which came just a
| few years after, they chose JS because so many people already
| knew it and could easily develop for it.
|
| I'd say the latter was the better idea, as there are far more
| shell extensions than Vala applications.
| itohihiyt wrote:
| I considered learning this but decided on flutter instead. Glad
| it's still going though.
| cendyne wrote:
| Vala was super neat as it came out of the ElementaryOS line of
| work. Their holistic focus towards usability and approachability
| of a Linux distro was inspiring enough that I even supported them
| with my meager student developer income. Since then, I've moved
| to Mac and haven't dabbled much in desktop Linux machines. As it
| grew older and some things got broken up (like serenity and
| ladybird), the novelty-energy wore off and I looked away for
| years.
|
| As a language, I hoped Vala would pave the way for a beautiful
| high performance application tool. Instead, we got Electron.
| mlinksva wrote:
| Vala is quite a bit older than ElementaryOS, though maybe
| that's the primary use for a long time now? I vaugely remember
| Vala as inspired by and reacting to an even earlier trend of
| GTK applicatons in C#/Mono such as F-Spot and Banshee.
| zerr wrote:
| Rule of thumb: No first class Windows support, a language never
| becomes popular enough.
| torginus wrote:
| Vala is an interesting language - it looks like C#, but is a
| compiled, reference counted, GObject based language (which is
| Gnome's/GTK's object model library), that simplifies/streamlines
| writing app code, compared to writing it in C.
|
| Which brings on an interesting historical tangent - back in the
| day, Windows applications were written against the COM object
| model, either in pure C, or C++ with MFC. The parallels are
| obvious - Microsoft needed a language that was easier to use and
| better suited for the needs for applications programmers.
|
| The obvious thing would've been to build something like Vala - a
| COM based reference counted compiled language - but they decided
| to build .NET/C# a garbage-collected JITted language with an
| entirely alien library and execution model. And while it became
| somewhat a success in the world of generic software dev, it never
| fulfilled this niche, with none of the core MS products ever
| integrating it, and most of the internal teams treating it with
| animosity.
|
| I wonder why Microsoft decided to go down this route.
| lukeh wrote:
| Perhaps it was an era when everyone was trying to compete with
| (or embrace) Java?
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