Issue #1; introduction, questions and whatever

This one was originally posted to the Vala mailing list on Sunday.

Hello everyone. Seeing the subject of this message, you probably started to wonder what the heck this is.
Here's the plan: Each weekend, I'm going to sumarize what is going on around Vala. This includes recently included features, open discussions, fixed issues, etcetera. I may even drop in some unintrusive advertisement of interesting projects written in Vala. ;)

The exact form this takes I haven't really decided yet, and will depend mainly on your feedback. The point will be to keep those of you, who are not subscribed to bugzilla and don't enjoy reading git log, informed, and make this list more involved in the development.

This week, since it is the first attempt, I just went through bugs changed during last month and picked those I find most interesting. This only includes language related bugs this time. Next time I'll probably include a full report of last weeks changes, add small info about some really cool projects that catch my interest (or someone points out to me), perhaps note discussions on the IRC channel that are relevant (in case I'm present there at the time. isn't there any log of the channel?). But as I said, the final form is still largely undecided.

So, enough of the introduction. In case you have any suggestions, feel free to present them to me. Also, any noteworthy information related to Vala should go straight to my INBOX. ;) If you have a blog where you write about Vala, I'd be glad if you dropped me a message as well.

Note:
I'm not a journalist, so this my attempt may very well seem lame at first. As has already been said, suggestions are more than welcome.


And here comes the promised bug digest. Enjoy!

Interesting new features to be (perhaps someday) added:
Consider these part of the next category as well. :)

Patch for native regular expression literals in the bugzilla.
Though I'm not a big user of those, I like it very much. :)
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607702

Complex conditionals! The form it should take is undecided. Comments needed.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606480

Local constants? Fairy old one. I don't know how useful that would be, really. What about you?
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=530623

This one proposes "in" operator to be usable for arrays. Quite nice I think.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=602511


Everyone's opinions welcome:
It would probably be best to discuss those here, so as not to spam bugzilla. Also, not all of you have an account there.

Should casting between array types convert members or just recalculate length?
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=515408

What should be the correct way to handle automatic properties in compact classes?
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607568

Complex array types. Any thoughts about elmarco's proposal?
I thinks it's quite cool and simple.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=571486

Nullability of out parameters. This can actually be quite unobvious at the moment. And I was getting it all wrong.. do'h!
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=591673


Some more interesting fixed problems:

Coalesce operator (??) is now implemented in master. ;)
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580816

Enums now support to_string ().
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=595458

You can compare structs now.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=530605

Signal.connect() now returns handler ID, so you can finally disconnect closures easily.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=537146

Pre- and post-conditions for constructors are now allowed.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607110

You can now declare multiple variables in for initializer.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601350

.end() for async methods should now work correctly.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606780

Throwing constructors shouldn't leak now.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=567181

Generic arrays as return values fixed.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=568972

Boxing and unboxing structs into GValue now works.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=590987

Relational operations now work with nullable types.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600652

You can use nullable structs as property type now.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606202

And, unfortunately, regressions:
Yeah, happens.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=608548
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=608553