Vala Journal

Vala on Android

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:12:00 +0000

Breaking news in the Vala programming language mailing list here.

It has been managed by tarnyko to compile Vala sources under Android and be able to use Cairo. GTK+ has not to been ported. I'm quoting the interesting part of message verbatim below:

I managed to compile a Vala source directly to Android binary yesterday. And I think it might be of some interest to some people here.

For the record, I've written a tutorial here: http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=node/25

It's still very limited (only access to core Vala + GLib/Gobject methods) but it could easily be extended by porting libraries having Vala bindings ; although I know it's not easy stuff.

For the graphical part, GTK+ doesn't work yet but I know Cairo has been ported (http://code.google.com/p/cairo4android/) -and Cairo definitely has Vala bindings.

More information at the Vala programming language homepage.

Vala 0.19.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:14:00 +0000

A new development version of the Vala programming language has been released.

Changes

Support scope = "async" attribute for parameters.
Add --api-version option.
Add atspi-2 bindings.
Add gstreamer-rtsp-server-1.0 bindings.
Bug fixes and binding updates.

It must be noted that the new scope = "async" attribute is implemented only for bindings and not for Vala-written code. The scope = "async" is used with delegates without GDestroyNotify, and it specifies that the delegate will be called only once. So Vala will automatically take care of ref'ing the user data when passing the delegate, and unref'ing it after the delegate has been called.

Vala 0.18.0 + GTK 3.4.2 for Win32

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:02:00 +0000

This is an update of the unofficial build of the Vala programming language for Win32 kindly contributed by tarnyko. His announcement is as follows:

I come back to announce a bundle for Vala 0.18.0 and GTK+ 3.4.2 on Windows. for Vala 0.18.0 and GTK+ 3.4.2 on Windows.
Download link here :
http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=node/13
or here :
http://www.tarnyko.net/dl/vala.htm
(A helpful being told me that my formers installers had the bad habit of emptying the PATH variable if it was longer than 1023 characters: http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=comment/307#comment-307. It is now fixed for all installers ; please re-download them just in case.)

News for ValaWinPKG users

The repos for Vala 0.16.0 and 0.18.0 are finally up !
There are some packages regressions:

FreeGLUT VAPI doesn't seem to work with Vala > 0.12.0. Needs some fixes from its original maintainer;
Poppler doesn't work anymore, should apparently be updated. Will do this when I have time.
There is a new package: LibUSB.

If you want to use these new repos, you should really update ValaWinPKG before (http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=node/12). Sorry, but it's the last time it should be necessary.
The new version of ValaWinPKG allows you to have multiple Vala installations and maintain their packages separately. See this tutorial (http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=node/14) for more info.

Regards,
Tarnyko

Gee 0.8.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 07:37:00 +0000

Together with Vala 0.18.0, the Vala collections library has also released the major 0.8.0 version, due to changes to the ABI.

Changes

Fix Traversable.chop (bug #684348)
Remove unnecessary method
Update README
Move everything to GenericAccessor

For more information and downloads see the Gee homepage.

Vala 0.18.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 07:30:00 +0000

The new stable branch of the Vala programming language has reached the 0.18.x version. There are major fixes and enhancements since the 0.16.x that are described below.

Changes since 0.16.0

Add libgnome-menu-3.0, gstreamer-1.0 core, gst-plugins-base-1.0, gobject-introspection-1.0 bindings.
Support subclassing of GLib.Source.
Switch pango bindings to .gir.
Warn when accessing static members with an instance reference.
Recompute length when casting between array types.
Support [GenericAccessors] attribute for interfaces.
Deprecate implicit .begin for async methods.
Drop Dova and POSIX profile.
Require and target GLib >= 2.18.
Support async creation methods.
Improve assertion messages.
Add --enable-gobject-tracing commandline option.
Support simple method-level profiling.
Add VALA_CHECK_MODULES and VALA_PROG_VAPIGEN to vala.m4.
Bug fixes and binding updates.

The [GenericAccessors] attribute allows using generics in interface methods. Before this change, it was impossible to access the generics information of a subclass from within an interface method. Adding this attribute on top of an interface will autogenerate virtual methods at the C level that are automatically implemented by subclasses. It must be noted that using this feature on an existing interface will break the ABI.

The method-level profiling is enabled by adding the [Profile] attribute on top of your methods. When your application terminates, some stats will be printed to the output.

For more information and download see the Vala homepage.

Vala bundle for Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:09:00 +0000

Hi,
tarnyko contributed an unofficial Vala bundle containing Vala 0.12.0 and GTK+ 3.4.2 for Windows XP/Vista/7.
This one contains GTK+ 2.20.0, too, so you can still compile older GTK+ programs without modification.
Download here :
http://www.tarnyko.net/en/?q=node/1
or here :
http://www.tarnyko.net/dl/vala.htm

For ValaWinPKG users, the corresponding repository has been uploaded. A few notes:

you should definitely update the program (here: http://www.tarnyko.net/dl/valawinpkg.htm) because 0.9b is broken with this bundl;
newer GLib allows use to have a Clutter package
newer GLib, however, gives problems with older LibGee and WebKit, so they've been removed from this new repo (should only be temporary);
LibMX package is planned.

Final note:
A Vala 0.16.0 for Win32 bundle is WIP. It already works, only needs a few tweaks before uploading.

Original discussion here: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/vala-list/2012-September/msg00065.html

Vala 0.17.5 has been released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 12:46:00 +0000

Hello, the new 0.17.5 development version of the Vala programming language has been released with lots of enhancements, bug fixes and language bindings.

Changes

Support subclassing of GLib.Source.
Switch pango bindings to .gir.
Add gstreamer-1.0 core bindings.
Add gst-plugins-base-1.0 bindings.
Add gobject-introspection-1.0 bindings.
Bug fixes and binding updates.

More information and download at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.17.4 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 17:38:00 +0000

The 0.17.4 development version of the Vala programming language has been released. Some interesting changes have been introduced, while others have been dropped toward a more cleaned up code base.

Changes

Warn when accessing static members with an instance reference.
Recompute length when casting between array types.
Support [GenericAccessors] attribute for interfaces.
Deprecate implicit .begin for async methods.
Drop Dova profile.
Drop POSIX profile.
Bug fixes and binding updates.

The [GenericAccessors] attribute allows using generics in interface methods. Before this change, it was impossible to access the generics information of a subclass from within an interface method. Adding this attribute on top of an interface will autogenerate virtual methods at the C level that are automatically implemented by subclasses. It must be noted that using this feature on an existing interface will break the ABI.

More information and download at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.17.3 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 08:02:00 +0000

The new 0.17.3 version of the Vala programming language has been released. We'll include the changes of the 0.17.1 release as we haven't posted them previously. We skipped the 0.17.2 and 0.16.1 versions as they haven't enhanced any feature.

Changes (both 0.17.3 and 0.17.1)

Require and target GLib >= 2.18.
Support async creation methods.
Improve assertion messages.
Add --enable-gobject-tracing commandline option.
Bug fixes and binding updates.

More information and downloads at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.17.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Fri, 11 May 2012 08:48:00 +0000

The new 0.17.x development cycle has started. This is the first release introducing several bug fixes and some enhancements.

Changes

Support simple method-level profiling.
Add VALA_CHECK_MODULES and VALA_PROG_VAPIGEN to vala.m4.
Bug fixes and binding updates.

The method-level profiling is enabled by adding the [Profile] attribute on top of your methods. When your application terminates, some stats will be printed to the output.

More information at the homepage of Vala.

Vala 0.16.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:38:00 +0000

The new stable version of the Vala programming language has been released.

Changes since 0.15.2

Add udisks2 bindings.
Bug fixes and binding updates.

More information and downloads at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.15.2 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:00:00 +0000

The new 0.15.2 version of the Vala programming language has been released. This version includes several bug fixes (including some regression fixes) and small but worthy enhancements.

Changes

Switch poppler-glib bindings to .gir.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

More information at the Vala homepage.

Valadoc website renewal

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:28:00 +0000

The valadoc website for unstable packages gets renewed:

A fast search for looking up symbols
Tooltips to read signature and short descriptions of symbols without leaving the page
Ajax loading of the web pages
It has a slightly new look that resembles gnome.org

Planned features:

Comments by the community, for sharing experience and examples
Proper syntax highlighting

This new version will be soon available for stable packages as well.

Valadoc is a tool for generating documentation for Vala projects and external projects featuring a GIR file, and much more.

Vala 0.14.2 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:12:00 +0000

The new 0.14.2 stable version of the Vala programming language has been released. This version doesn't only include many bug fixes but also many enhancements.

Changes

Add libnl-3.0 bindings.
Add packagekit-glib2 bindings.
Add xtst bindings.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

More information at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.15.1 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:41:00 +0000

The new 0.15.1 version of the Vala programming language has been released. This version introduces a lot of enhancements and regression fixes with regards to the previous 0.15.0 release.

Changes

Support arrays with nullable elements.
Add support to .gir reader and writer.
Switch clutter-gtk-1.0 bindings to .gir.
Switch gio-2.0 bindings to .gir.
Add cogl-pango-1.0 bindings.
Add gdl-3.0 bindings.
Add libnl-3.0 bindings.
Add packagekit-glib2 bindings.
Add xtst bindings.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Important breakage note
Now captured parameters of array type are no more copied implicitly by Vala. A captured parameter is one of the following:

Either it is a parameter of an async method
Or it is a parameter used inside of a closure

The advantage is that async methods in GIO that have arrays as parameters (like buffers) can finally be overridden, otherwise impossible. Same goes parameters referred by closures.
Therefore, if you were relying on the implicit array copy made by Vala in these cases, please take care of this change.

More information and downloads at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.15.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:11:00 +0000

The development snapshot version 0.15.0 of the Vala programming language has been released. All the bugs fixes shipped with 0.14.1 have been included in 0.15.0 plus other fixes and enhancements.

Changes

Manage memory of GQueue elements.
Switch atk bindings to .gir.
Switch gdk-pixbuf-2.0 bindings to .gir.
Switch gdk-3.0 bindings to .gir.
Add libwnck-3.0 bindings.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Most notably this release fixes the memory management with GLib.Queue. If you were using this data structure, the change will fix several memory leaks.

More information and download at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.14.1 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:43:00 +0000

The new stable release 0.14.1 of the Vala programming language introduces a number of significant fixes with regards to the first 0.14.0 stable release. It is very recommended to upgrade to 0.14.1.

Changes

Add libwnck-3.0 bindings.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

More information and downloads at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.14.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:25:00 +0000

Hello,
the new stable 0.14 version of Vala has been released. Changes since 0.13.4 are bug fixes, nothing particularly noteworthy.

Changes since version 0.12.1:

Enable flow analysis for out parameters.
Refactor attribute handling.
More refactoring in the code generator.
Improvements to the .gir reader.
Drop deprecated support for D-Bus GLib in favor of GDBus.
Add gedit-3.0, gtksourceview-3.0, rest-0.7, vte-2.90 and libpeas-1.0 bindings.
Switch pangocairo, gudev-1.0, mx-1.0, clutter-1.0, libgdata, libsoup-2.4 and json-glib-1.0 bindings to use GIR.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Additionally you might want to take a look at the notes in the following two links when upgrading to vala 0.14:

More information at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.13.4 has been released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:51:00 +0000

The new 0.13.4 version of the Vala programming language has been released. Notice that we didn't announce the 0.13.3 version on this blog. So this post will be cumulative of the changes since version 0.13.2:

Changes

Switch pangocairo bindings to .gir.
Switch gudev-1.0 bindings to .gir.
Switch mx-1.0 bindings to .gir.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

As usual more information and download at the Vala homepage.

Libgee 0.7.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:35:00 +0000

Hello,
the new 0.7.0 version of libgee has been released. Libgee is a collection library providing GObject-based interfaces and classes for commonly used data structures.

API changes

Move to delegates with targets
Name of delegates moved into Gee namespace (Alban Browaeys)
Gee.Hashable interface
Moved Iterator.first into BidirIterator.first
Allow checking if iterator is valid by Iterator.valid property
Add highier-level functions by Traversable interface
Add lazy values
Introduce SortedMap interface

New implementations

TreeMap now implements SortedMap

Infrastructure

Use automake 1.11 vala support
Allow installation in parallel with libgee 0.5/0.6

Code Quality

Many bug fixes
Allow better code optimization for user by higher level functions
Lots of additional documentation

Also please note that now Libgee has its own mailing-list and its own #gee IRC channel.

More information at the libgee homepage.

Vala 0.13.2 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 21:01:00 +0000

Hello,
after one month of active development, the new 0.13.2 version of the Vala programming language has been released.

Changes

Enable flow analysis for out parameters.
Refactor attribute handling.
Add gedit-3.0 bindings.
Add gtksourceview-3.0 bindings.
Add rest-0.7 bindings.
Add vte-2.90 bindings.
Switch clutter-1.0 bindings to .gir.
Switch libgdata bindings to .gir.
Switch libsoup bindings to .gir.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Some stats since 0.13.1: 216 commits and 77+ bug fixes (56 of which were bug reports).

libvala breakage. Due to the "Refactor attribute handling" point in the release notes, the libvala API regarding the C information of symbols etc. has changed. All the C bits like get_cname() have been moved out of the code tree into CCodeBaseModule. Notice that CCodeBaseModule extensively cache the results of the calls per codenode, and never invalidates it.

valac file.vapi breakage. Passing .vapi files to valac won't peek the relative .deps file anymore. This behavior will be available only when using the --pkg switch.

out parameter warnings. The "Enable flow analysis for out parameters" point in the release notes means that out parameters must be initialized both before using it and before returning from the method.

More information and download at the Vala homepage.

Generators in Vala

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 07:16:00 +0000

Hello,
here I'll show a cool snippet code making use Vala async functions for emulating Python/Ruby generators. Creating a generator is as simple as extending the Generator class and implementing the generate() method.

abstract class Generator<G> {
    private bool consumed;
    private G value;
    private SourceFunc callback;

    public Generator () {
        helper ();
    }

    private async void helper () {
        yield generate ();
        consumed = true;
    }

    protected abstract async void generate ();

    protected async void feed (G value) {
        this.value = value;
        this.callback = feed.callback;
        yield;
    }

    public bool next () {
        return !consumed;
    }

    public G get () {
        var result = value;
        callback ();
        return result;
    }

    public Generator<G> iterator () {
        return this;
    }
}

class IntGenerator : Generator<int> {
    protected override async void generate () {
        for (int i=0; i < 10; i++) {
            yield feed (i);
        }
    }
}

void main () {
    var gen = new IntGenerator ();
    foreach (var i in gen) {
        message ("%d", i);
    }
}

You can find the above code snippet here as well.

Vala 0.13.1 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:09:00 +0000

Hello,
the new development version 0.13.1 of the Vala programming language has been released.
Below the changes since version 0.13.0:

Changes

New libpeas-1.0 bindings (Michal Hruby).
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

More information and download at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.13.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:45:00 +0000

Hello,
after two months of active development, the Vala programming language has reached version 0.13.0.

Changes

More refactoring in the code generator.
Improvements to the .gir reader.
Switch JSON-GLib bindings to .gir.
Drop deprecated support for D-Bus GLib in favor of GDBus.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Some numbers: 314 commits and 94 bug fixes since version 0.12.0. So this new development release is a mix of enhancements and fixes.

A noteworthy change is the deprecation of copying delegates. A delegate is copied when it is assigned to an owned delegate variable like this:

SourceFunc a = () => false;
SourceFunc b = a;

You will get a warning: "copying delegates is discouraged". This is because of the nature of delegates in glib. Owned delegate variables have a related target and a GDestroyNotify, but it's not known how to copy/ref the target. Therefore, it's impossible to copy/ref a delegate target.

So, how do we shut the warning? There are two ways:

1) If you don't need owned delegate, you can assign to an unowned variable like this: unowned SourceFunc b = a;
2) If you want to transfer the ownership: SourceFunc b = (owned) a; After this, you can still invoke a() but the target will not be destroyed anymore when a runs out of the scope.

You might experience the same warning for delegate properties as well, like this:

public SourceFunc func { get; set; }

Here there are two solutions:
1) If you need owned delegate, use owned set like this: public SourceFunc func { get; owned set; }, while keeping the getter unowned.
2) If you don't need owned delegate: public unowned SourceFunc func { get; set }

It must be noted that due to a bug (now fixed in this release), although you defined an owned delegate property, it was practically unowned.

Vala 0.12.1 released

noreply@blogger.com (Luca Bruno aka Lethalman) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:18:00 +0000

Hello,
the new stable version 0.12.1 of the Vala programming language has been released.

Release notes are "Many bug fixes and binding updates.".
From a quantitative view point, this release fixed 42 reported bugs plus other 30 commits with fixes.

Stay tuned for the 0.13.0 development release

More information and download at the Vala homepage.