On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Jürg Billeter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> We are pleased to announce version 0.3.3 of Vala, a compiler for the
> GObject type system.
>
> Vala 0.3.3 is now available for download at:
>   http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.3/
>
> Changes since 0.3.2
>  * Support overriding default method handlers of signals.
>  * Support dynamic access to properties and signals of GObjects.


Every time a new Vala release comes out, there are features that I don't
understand. Maybe these are obvious to everyone else, but what does "dynamic
access to properties" mean?

It would be great to have a few sentences explaining each new significant
feature...

Thanks,
Michael


>  * Experimental support for nullable value types.
>  * Improve support for classes not deriving from GLib.Object.
>  * Support """verbatim strings""".
>  * Add parser for Genie (Jamie McCracken)
>  * Experimental support for arrays of arrays.
>  * Documentation improvements (Phil Housley)
>  * Improvements to D-Bus support (Ali Sabil, Philip Van Hoof, Yu Feng)
>  * Add libepc-1.0 bindings (Ali Sabil)
>  * Add libtiff bindings (Christian Meyer)
>  * Updates to the GStreamer bindings (Ali Sabil and Jaap A. Haitsma)
>  * Many bug fixes and performance improvements.
>
> 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. It's also planned to generate GIDL files when gobject-
> introspection is ready.
>
> 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. Each to
> be used library requires a Vala API file at compile-time, containing the
> class and method declarations in Vala syntax. Vala currently comes with
> bindings for current versions of GLib, GTK+, and many more.
>
> 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
>
>
> The Vala Team
>
>        Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Vala-list mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
>
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