Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
On 10/09/2013 06:00, Landon Blake wrote: I have some interest in making small improvements to Genie. I've been wanting to learn more Vala programming...and Genie seems like a great little language. I think this might be a cool project. (I think both Genie and Vala are important for to make Gnome programming more accessible to more programmers.) I'd obviously would need to start by looking at the Vala source code files for Genie. I'm a little confused at how Genie works. I read on the Genie web page that it compiles down to byte code like Vala, yet it is written in Vala. That makes me think it would work more like an interpreted language than a compiled one...but I could be missing something obvious. I do know a bit about parsing, and have written some fairly gnarly parsers before. Your vision of Genie is quite complex :-) Forget about what you said. This is how vala works: lexer - parser - analysis - codegen. Genie only has its own lexer and parser. It's just 3 files: - https://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/tree/vala/valagenieparser.vala - https://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/tree/vala/valageniescanner.vala - https://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/tree/vala/valagenietokentype.vala In other words, the only difference between Vala and Genie is the syntax, the semantics is the same for both Vala and Genie. The code is really really straightforward to understand. Best regards, ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 21:00 -0700, Landon Blake wrote: I have some interest in making small improvements to Genie. I've been wanting to learn more Vala programming...and Genie seems like a great little language. I think this might be a cool project. (I think both Genie and Vala are important for to make Gnome programming more accessible to more programmers.) I'd obviously would need to start by looking at the Vala source code files for Genie. I'm a little confused at how Genie works. I read on the Genie web page that it compiles down to byte code like Vala, yet it is written in Vala. That makes me think it would work more like an interpreted language than a compiled one...but I could be missing something obvious. I'm not sure where you're looking, but that's not true. Genie is compiled by valac to C (just like Vala) which is then compiled by a C compiler into native code. Internally, Genie uses the same AST as Vala, which is why it is part of the Vala project. The AST is not what is used when executing the code— it is merely an intermediate representation which is part of the compiler. If that's what made you think bytecode, you should read the Wikipedia page on ASTs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree -Evan ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
Landon, Jamie has been doing a great job in responding to bugs in the last few days. He probably needed the jolt from this mailing list to realize that, yes, there is interest in Genie, and people are writing big things in it. I hope this trend will continue. Also, it seems that some of the issues that I reported a year ago have resolved themselves somehow. I'm feeling less alarmed and more hopeful now. I'm determined to continue using Genie and open bugs as I see them, knowing that someone on the other end will take them seriously and respond. Very happy to have you join, I'm sure Jamie could use some help! valac has been self-hosting for a while, meaning that it itself is written in Vala. This includes the parsers for Genie and Vala languages: both parse the language source code into the same data structure, which valac then outputs as C code. If you involve yourself in Genie, you would likely not have to deal with the C-code generation. All of Genie is really just a single .vala file. (It would be fairly easy to add other dialects to valac, too. Well, as long as the maintainer can make sure to keep the dialect up to date with the latest capabilities...) As a convenience, valac can send all these generated C files to gcc, which does the actual compilation to binary. But valac is not itself a binary compiler. So, no, not quite an interpreted language, but also not a to-binary compiler. In a sense, it's a bit like some pre-processors for C/C++. It's really quite brilliant: all the advantages of C code, and many of the advantages of higher-level languages. I have a large project that involves Genie, C and C++ together. C++ requires some special integration work, but otherwise everything works together wonderfully. On 09/10/2013 12:00 PM, Landon Blake wrote: I have some interest in making small improvements to Genie. I've been wanting to learn more Vala programming...and Genie seems like a great little language. I think this might be a cool project. (I think both Genie and Vala are important for to make Gnome programming more accessible to more programmers.) I'd obviously would need to start by looking at the Vala source code files for Genie. I'm a little confused at how Genie works. I read on the Genie web page that it compiles down to byte code like Vala, yet it is written in Vala. That makes me think it would work more like an interpreted language than a compiled one...but I could be missing something obvious. I do know a bit about parsing, and have written some fairly gnarly parsers before. Jamie was mentioned earlier in this thread as the current maintainer for Genie. Is Jamie still around to answer questions? Still chewing this project over...and wondering how hard it will be to dive in and understand the existing Vala code that makes Genie work. I'd hate to see it abandoned for lack of interest. Landon ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
It doesn't seem that Jamie has the capacity -- or any one single person would -- to maintain Genie at the same depth as the Vala dialect. Frankly, fixing serious bugs once a year is not enough for a cutting-edge programming language. And it's falling far behind Vala in features. After some thinking, I want to make this suggestion: Jamie, or anyone else, would it be possible to write a tool to translate Genie files to Vala? I imagine this would not be too hard with the current Genie parser code. This would allow those of us who invested a lot in Genie an easy transition into the mainline. We would just say that Genie was a brave, terrific experiment that ultimately failed. An example of one of my huge Genie projects: http://code.google.com/p/khovsgol/source/browse/ That's 17,000+ lines of code in a language that's going to be left behind. Please don't make me rewrite it in Vala. I already rewrote it once from Python to Genie. :/ -Tal ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
It would be easier to add the newer syntax to Genie and keep supporting it rather than creating a tool translating from Genie to Vala. Syntax changes are done rarely (one or two in a year). It's only about syncing Genie once in a while. The Genie code is so small that I'm sure any Genie programmer is able to sync the language. ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
On Sun, 2013-09-08 at 14:22 +0800, Tal Liron wrote: After some thinking, I want to make this suggestion: Jamie, or anyone else, would it be possible to write a tool to translate Genie files to Vala? I imagine this would not be too hard with the current Genie parser code. This would allow those of us who invested a lot in Genie an easy transition into the mainline. We would just say that Genie was a brave, terrific experiment that ultimately failed. It wouldn't be extremely difficult to generate working Vala code. The existing valac --dump-tree=foo.vala functionality is not very far away. However, even if that was fixed to produce working Vala code, the generated code wouldn't be ideal: everything in a single source file, no code comments, lower level looping constructs and conditionals, extra temporary variables, and maybe more. I agree with Luca that it would be easier to improve the Genie parser. It's written in Vala but it's not very difficult to make changes as it's a handwritten parser. Copying a syntactic element from Vala may sometimes be as simple as copying a method from valaparser.vala to valagenieparser.vala. The Vala parser is not being modified frequently these days (two commits this year so far), so it wouldn't require a big effort to stay in sync. If you'd like to continue using Genie, I'd suggest to consider working a bit on the Genie parser yourself. Regards, Jürg ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
Thank you for your suggestion, but I don't have time to support yet another free software project at the moment. (A contribute to and manage over 20 projects.) My contributions have been in promoting Genie by giving talks about it, as well as opening many bugs. I'm willing to help in testing bug fixes. As for it being not very difficult, I'm delighted to hear that, but unfortunately it does seems difficult, not in terms of programming, but in terms of project management. But we've had serious bugs languishing for more than a year, and there's no clear plan to fix them or continue supporting Genie in the future. I'm dismayed by the responses here. There's doesn't seem to be anyone taking leadership on this issue. For myself, I've decided to abandon Genie unless there is a major structural change in terms of managing it. I will now need to do the hard work of converting my Genie projects to Vala. :( On 09/08/2013 03:48 PM, Jürg Billeter wrote: On Sun, 2013-09-08 at 14:22 +0800, Tal Liron wrote: After some thinking, I want to make this suggestion: Jamie, or anyone else, would it be possible to write a tool to translate Genie files to Vala? I imagine this would not be too hard with the current Genie parser code. This would allow those of us who invested a lot in Genie an easy transition into the mainline. We would just say that Genie was a brave, terrific experiment that ultimately failed. It wouldn't be extremely difficult to generate working Vala code. The existing valac --dump-tree=foo.vala functionality is not very far away. However, even if that was fixed to produce working Vala code, the generated code wouldn't be ideal: everything in a single source file, no code comments, lower level looping constructs and conditionals, extra temporary variables, and maybe more. I agree with Luca that it would be easier to improve the Genie parser. It's written in Vala but it's not very difficult to make changes as it's a handwritten parser. Copying a syntactic element from Vala may sometimes be as simple as copying a method from valaparser.vala to valagenieparser.vala. The Vala parser is not being modified frequently these days (two commits this year so far), so it wouldn't require a big effort to stay in sync. If you'd like to continue using Genie, I'd suggest to consider working a bit on the Genie parser yourself. Regards, Jürg ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
On Thursday, 29 August 2013, 9:53 Tal Liron wrote I like your two suggestions, Al, and hope you will open them as enhancements so at least we can track them. But this discussion on specifics is pointless if no work will be done on Genie! I've logged my two suggested enhancements. Next year I will try and look at implementing them. I think the summary of the wider discussion is that the Vala community are OK with Genie so long as it is useful and maintains to be and that Jamie McCracken has indicated he will try and deal with serious bugs. There is a big gap here and that is the Genie community. I'm going to raise three new threads here to see what response we get. Al P.S. Thanks for sharing the link to your Genie talk. Some useful stuff there. ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
I'm not sure how Genie is more transitional than Vala in your view. Both offer the same benefits, just with a different syntax. Some of the bugs are real bugs: things that are supposed to work but don't. Some of them are requests to get Genie on par with Vala features -- there are things you simply can't do in Genie right now, but can do in Vala, and they are important. You can argue that these aren't bugs per se, but they do make Genie weak. But some are truly linguistic: you are free to argue that the if statement is not broken, but I think if you read my bug report carefully you'll see that in many trivial situations it would indeed appear to be quite broken. The current if behavior is simply bad. Also, the current syntax makes it impossible to use generics in many common situations. I like your two suggestions, Al, and hope you will open them as enhancements so at least we can track them. But this discussion on specifics is pointless if no work will be done on Genie! I believe that the Vala team should reach a clear decision as to what to do with Genie. If Genie cannot be supported, then the responsible thing to do would be to say so and update the GNOME site. On 08/29/2013 03:15 AM, Al Thomas wrote: I see Genie as a great transitional language, allowing programmers to code at a low level for C libraries and GObject while still using a friendly syntax like Python. So it helps in the transition for people using scripting languages to lower level system programming. I use it and want to carry on using it. ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
On Thu, 2013-08-29 at 16:53 +0800, Tal Liron wrote: But this discussion on specifics is pointless if no work will be done on Genie! I believe that the Vala team should reach a clear decision as to what to do with Genie. If Genie cannot be supported, then the responsible thing to do would be to say so and update the GNOME site. Genie support was merged under the condition that Jamie keeps maintaining it (or we find someone else who is willing and able to maintain it). He wrote a couple of days ago that he will try and support Genie to deal with serious bugs, but he's not planning to invest time in enhancements. If this is not sufficient to keep Genie alive and useful, someone else needs to step up as maintainer or we will indeed deprecate it to not mislead users. Regards, Jürg ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
Useful is a relative term... it's useful as is, despite bugs and missing features. However, in my opinion more work needs to be done *continuously* in order to make it not only useful, but of quality consistent with that of the Vala language. Low-quality pieces of the Vala project diminish its overall value. Jamie, I hope you will step up! Genie a terrific contribution to free software. On 08/29/2013 05:10 PM, Jürg Billeter wrote: On Thu, 2013-08-29 at 16:53 +0800, Tal Liron wrote: But this discussion on specifics is pointless if no work will be done on Genie! I believe that the Vala team should reach a clear decision as to what to do with Genie. If Genie cannot be supported, then the responsible thing to do would be to say so and update the GNOME site. Genie support was merged under the condition that Jamie keeps maintaining it (or we find someone else who is willing and able to maintain it). He wrote a couple of days ago that he will try and support Genie to deal with serious bugs, but he's not planning to invest time in enhancements. If this is not sufficient to keep Genie alive and useful, someone else needs to step up as maintainer or we will indeed deprecate it to not mislead users. Regards, Jürg ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
You're not the first, and sadly, I'm sure, you won't be the last to complain on this list about the state of bugs for Vala. As far as Genie, I don't know what to tell you. Is there a separate mailing list for Genie? I'm not sure i've ever seen a question come across here for it. Is anyone else on this list a regular user of Genie? Steven N. Oliver On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 4:51 AM, Tal Liron tal.li...@gmail.com wrote: I think Genie is a wonderful idea, and have invested a lot in it: three rather large applications, and more coming in the future. However, I'm very concerned about its future. It has some serious linguistic problems and bugs. I've reported many of them on Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/**buglist.cgi?bug_status=** UNCONFIRMEDbug_status=NEW**bug_status=REOPENED** emailreporter1=1emailtype1=**exactemail1=tal.liron%**40gmail.comhttps://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMEDbug_status=NEWbug_status=REOPENEDemailreporter1=1emailtype1=exactemail1=tal.liron%40gmail.com These bugs have been languishing for almost a year without them being assigned to anyone. Are there plans to continue supporting Genie? If not, I think it should be deprecated and removed from Vala. As it stands, it seems like a made a mistake investing in it, and should rewrite everything in Vala. :( -Tal __**_ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/**mailman/listinfo/vala-listhttps://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
I don't know if this list is the best indicator of usage... Anyway, we had Jamie McCracken (its creator) post here as if he doesn't know if anybody is using Genie, and in any case doesn't plan any further enhancements. So, that sounds like Genie dead. I'm OK with that, of course, but I think the responsible thing to do would be to remove all mention of Genie from the GNOME web site and deprecate its support immediately. It's hard enough to get people on board new languages without having the languages then taken away from them. But does it really matter if not a lot of people are using Genie now? Well, I think they *should* be using Genie. So many people prefer Python/Ruby-like syntax over anything that looks like Java/C#. The potential is there, Jamie had a brilliant idea, and it would be wonderful to have the rest of the Vala project properly back it. I gave a video-recorded talk about Genie a while ago and it generated a bit of interest: http://pyvideo.org/speaker/836/tal-liron (Some problems with sound in the first few minutes, later fixed) -Tal On 08/28/2013 07:50 PM, Steven Oliver wrote: You're not the first, and sadly, I'm sure, you won't be the last to complain on this list about the state of bugs for Vala. As far as Genie, I don't know what to tell you. Is there a separate mailing list for Genie? I'm not sure i've ever seen a question come across here for it. Is anyone else on this list a regular user of Genie? Steven N. Oliver ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
Re: [Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Al Thomas astav...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: There are certainly significant bugs in Genie. I thing some are listed in Bugzilla for lists and dicts, which are one of the great benefits of using Genie and Vala, rather than C. The other bugs I have found are nested conditional statements. So good quality bug reporting and prioritising on significant failings would certainly help new people learning Genie and keep their momentum up with learning the language. Are a lot of these also bugs in Vala or are you only talking bugs specific to Genie? ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
[Vala] Worried about the state of Genie
I think Genie is a wonderful idea, and have invested a lot in it: three rather large applications, and more coming in the future. However, I'm very concerned about its future. It has some serious linguistic problems and bugs. I've reported many of them on Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMEDbug_status=NEWbug_status=REOPENEDemailreporter1=1emailtype1=exactemail1=tal.liron%40gmail.com These bugs have been languishing for almost a year without them being assigned to anyone. Are there plans to continue supporting Genie? If not, I think it should be deprecated and removed from Vala. As it stands, it seems like a made a mistake investing in it, and should rewrite everything in Vala. :( -Tal ___ vala-list mailing list vala-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
