Hi Eric, On Sun, Aug 07, 2011 at 02:14:45PM -0700, Eric Gregory wrote: > On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 1:03 PM, oliver <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > > > I looked at the introduction on Vala > > (just skimmed it). > > > > There it's written: > > > > - Programs written in Vala should have broadly similar performance to > > those > > written directly in C, whilst being easier and faster to write and > > maintain. > > > > - A Vala application can do nothing that a C equivalent cannot. Whilst > > Vala > > introduces a lot of language features that are not available in C, these > > are > > all mapped to C constructs, although they are often ones that are > > difficult > > or too time consuming to write directly. > > > > Both sound very interesting. > > It looks like using C for speed then will not be necessarily. > > > > Can the shotwell programmers confirm/affirm the above two statements? > > > > Hi Oliver, > > Yes, those two statements are absolutely true. Vala looks like Java or C#, > but it doesn't require any special runtime and it doesn't have a > mark-and-sweep garbage collector. It uses refcounting for memory management, > and Vala source is compiled to C (valac is technically a source compiler) so > your program or library inter-operates very well with C.
Say, there is some C-Code that should be married with Vala, is there an easy way to marry Vala and C? This might be necessary to use some libraries, and have some intermediate C code for that. Or how could certain libraries with C-API be connected to Vala? > > Of course, Vala isn't 100% optimal in all cases. A good analog is hand-coded > assembly vs. a C program. Sure, you could spend many hours tweaking your > assembly code to be perfect, or you could just write it in C and take a > negligible performance hit. Same goes for Vala vs. C. > > Hope that helps! Yes, thanks. Not sure if I will have the time to look at Vala in more depth. But if so, I would do it with shotwell in mind (and as main motivation), so that I maybe also could contribute some code. Maybe one of the ideas I talked about (the distributed database-issue)... (For which I did not got feedback so far). Shotwell at laest seems to be a program that's worth looking at Vala in more depth. It's already convincing. Ciao, Oliver _______________________________________________ Shotwell mailing list [email protected] http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
