Vala Journal

Vala 0.14.2 released

2012-01-31T15:12:00.002Z

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

2012-01-26T23:41:00.000Z

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

2011-12-06T20:11:00.001Z

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

2011-11-30T14:43:00.001Z

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

2011-09-17T16:25:00.002Z

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

2011-09-07T15:51:00.002Z

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

2011-08-19T14:35:00.002Z

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

2011-08-16T21:01:00.004Z

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

2011-07-09T07:16:00.008Z

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

2011-07-06T15:09:00.006Z

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

2011-06-17T17:45:00.010Z

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

2011-06-01T19:18:00.006Z

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.

Vala 0.13 preview

2011-05-23T22:06:00.003Z

Hello,
Vala 0.12.0 has been released on April the 3th. So, you may think that the project is a little dead without a new release in almost two months. Well, this is not the case!

I'd like to introduce beforehand that the new development cycle will include lots of bug fixes, lots of code generator improvements and lots of gir parser improvements.

If you ever wanted to try out Vala, I'm pretty sure you will enjoy Vala 0.14. Stay tuned!

Vala 0.12.0 released

2011-04-04T12:59:00.005Z

Hello,
a new stable release of the Vala programming language has been released. The version 0.12.0 is now out and branched, therefore the new development series will be 0.13.

Changes since 0.11.7

Add get_next_char to string class.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Changes since 0.10.4

Add last_index_of, last_index_of_char, get_next_char, index_of, index_of_char, char_count to string class.
Add parse and try_parse methods to boolean and numeric types.
Add clutter-gtk-1.0, pixmap-1 bindings.
Refactoring in the code generator.
Improvements to the .gir writer.
Support BusName sender parameter in GDBus servers.
Update libnotify bindings to 0.7.0.
Improvements to the .gir reader.
Require and target GLib >= 2.16.
Guard access to out parameters to allow null arguments.
Add support for local constants.
Support file descriptor passing with GDBus.
Support cached property values in GDBus clients.
Support Cancellable parameter in GDBus clients.
Support no-reply methods in GDBus clients and servers.

I'd like to anticipate that the first 0.13.0 version will completely drop the dbus-glib support in favor of gdbus (migrating guide for C).

Stay tuned for the next stable and development releases.

Vala 0.11.7 released

2011-03-16T19:29:00.002Z

Hello,
a new version of the 0.11.x development series of the Vala programming language has been released.

Changes

Add support for async signal handlers (Frederik Sdun).
More refactoring in the code generator (Luca Bruno).
Improvements to the .gir writer (Michal Hruby).
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

The first mentioned change allows passing an async method as callback for a signal. The behavior is simple: the async method will be started when the signal is fired, like with async_method_cb.begin().

Vala 0.11.6 released

2011-02-15T13:58:00.004Z

Hello,
a new version of the 0.11.x development series of the Vala programming language has been released.

Changes

Add parse and try_parse methods to boolean and numeric types.
Add clutter-gtk-1.0 bindings.
Add pixmap-1 bindings (Evan Nemerson).
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Most notably in this release is the deprecation of string.to_basictype() methods in favor of basictype.parse (...). This allows a more elastic convention for adding further parsing methods for other types.

As usual download and more information at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.11.5 released

2011-01-21T18:35:00.005Z

Hello,
a new version of the Vala programming language has been released. The previous version 0.11.4 was released only about a week ago, so the development is going on fast.

Changes

Add last_index_of and last_index_of_char to string class.
More refactoring in the code generator (Luca Bruno).
Improvements to the .gir writer (Michal Hruby).
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

More information and download at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.11.4 released

2011-01-15T21:24:00.004Z

Hello,

the 0.11.4 version of the Vala programming language has been released.

Changes

Add index_of, index_of_char, and char_count to string class.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Most of changed the methods to the string class (like string.index_of) replaced other methods (like string.chr), that are now deprecated.

This version, though released soon after the 0.11.3 version, contains a lot of bug fixes.

Information and download at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.10.2 and 0.11.3 released

2011-01-06T09:31:00.002Z

Hello,
stable and development version of the Vala programming language have been released.

Vala 0.10.2 changes are bug fixes and binding updates.

Vala 0.11.3 changes are:

Support BusName sender parameter in GDBus servers.
More refactoring in the code generator.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

More information and download at the Vala homepage.

Valag 1.1 released, graph generator for the Vala AST

2010-12-19T12:25:00.001Z

Hello,

a new version of Valag, a graphviz generator for the Vala language AST, has been released.

Changes since 1.0 version:

Add --format and --prefix options.
Update to latest libvala-0.12.
Bug fixes.

This new version also distributes the xdot.py program as a viewer for the generated graphs.

More information and download at the Valag homepage.

Maja - The Vala to Javascript compiler

2010-12-17T19:49:00.000Z

Hello,

the first version of Maja, the Vala to Javascript compiler, has just been released. The mapping is not quite complete but you can do pretty much everything you could do with javascript directly. There are (still incomplete) bindings for the qooxdoo framework and the demo browser is being ported to vala successfully.

Maja can be used in any environments, not only web browsers.

Programming in Vala saves you from lots of type safety troubles (Javascript), lot of typing (Java) and the syntax is really enjoyable as it is quite close to the Javascript model.

Usage and download at the homepage.

Vala 0.11.2 released

2010-11-08T20:55:00.002Z

Hello,
the development series of Vala continues and we got another release full of bug fixes, binding updates as usual and enhancements on the GIR side.

Changes

Update libnotify bindings to 0.7.0.
Improvements to the .gir reader.
Bug fixes and binding updates.

More information and download at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.10.1 released

2010-10-26T20:22:00.003Z

Hello,
the new version of the most stable Vala compiler has been released. Obviously, no features have been added, instead many bugs have been fixed.

Changes

Remove outdated GTK+ 3 bindings.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

More information and download at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.11.1 release

2010-10-25T17:30:00.004Z

Hello,
this is a new release of the development series of the Vala programming language. As you can see a lot of improvement on the side of GDbus has been made. Also notice the resolution of the out parameters nightmare, guarded access is provided automatically by Vala so you don't need to check whether the out parameter is null or not.

Changes

Require and target GLib >= 2.16.
Guard access to out parameters to allow null arguments.
Add support for local constants.
Support file descriptor passing with GDBus.
Support cached property values in GDBus clients.
Support Cancellable parameter in GDBus clients.
Support no-reply methods in GDBus clients and servers.
More refactoring in the code generator.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

As usual, more information and download at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.11.0 released

2010-10-06T08:19:00.003Z

Hello,
after Vala 0.10.0 a new development series has begun with new features and changes. Vala 0.10 will continue to be updated when necessary. So these are the release notes of this new release:

Use byte indices for strings. Accessing strings by index is now based on bytes, no more on characters. This is an important change for applications relying on character indices for unicode strings.
Use uint8[] for binary data in bindings.
Add support for parallel compilation. To take advantage of this feature it is suggested to make use of parvala, distributed together with vala under the contrib/parvala directory.
Improve compiler performance.
More refactoring in the code generator.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

As usual more information and downloads at Vala homepage.

Vala 0.10.0 released

2010-09-17T23:30:00.000Z

Actually, there are two announcements today.
Let's start with the interesting one,

Vala 0.10.0 has just been released!

download at: http://download.gnome.org/sources/vala/0.10/

Changes since 0.9.8 include
* Port GIR parser and writer to GIR version 1.2.
* Update GLib bindings to 2.26 branch.
* Bug fixes.

That's it. Nothing too fancy for this round release, so you'll enjoy it mainly if you are interested in bindings or a bug that affects you has been fixed.
Also, if you didn't know already, you probably just noticed that 1.0 is not next in line. That's right and I don't think we should expect it anytime soon. There's still so much to do, you know.

Let's get to the other announcement then, no less important..
Blogger SUCKS!
No, seriously, should we switch to wordpress or some other blog hosting? Actually, the first ever comment on this blog was a request that we move there. I didn't pay much attention back then. So what do you think? What is your experience?

Vala 0.9.8 released

2010-09-05T10:12:00.002Z

Hello,
a new version of the Vala programming language has been released yesterday.

Changes

Add --fatal-warnings commandline option.
Deprecate string.len () in favor of string.length.
Deprecate use of D-Bus GLib in favor of GDBus.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

As usual, more information and download at the homepage.

Vala 0.9.7 released

2010-08-19T19:26:00.001Z

A small update was released today that fixes a regression introduced with previous version. In case you use 0.9.6 already, update is very recommended.

As always, see homepage for further details and download.

Vala 0.9.6 release

2010-08-18T13:52:00.003Z

Hello,
a new versione of the Vala programming language has been released. This version contains some bugfixes and the beginning of the codegen refactoring which will lead to lots of bugfixes in the next releases.

Changes

Drop deprecated support for assigning to construct properties.
Some refactoring in the code generator.
Bug fixes in bindings and vapigen.

As always, download and more information at the homepage.

Vala 0.9.5 released

2010-08-09T09:03:00.002Z

Hello,
another version of the Vala programming language has been released. The homepage has been reorganized and some content has been added for planning and bug triaging. Release notes:

Add version suffix to support parallel installation.
Define VALA_X_Y according to compiler version.
Enable version header by default.
Add vala.m4 with VALA_CHECK_PACKAGES macro.
Add gedit-2.20 bindings (Andrea Del Signore).
Add tokyocabinet bindings (Evan Nemerson).
Various improvements to the Dova profile.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

More information at the download page.

Puzzled by locking in Vala?

2010-08-04T12:42:00.006Z

If you can't wrap your head around how Vala locks variables, take a look at this great article about locking in Vala by Jim Nelson.
Apart from explaining how it actually works, he also compares it to Java, which is perfect if you come from that strange world :).

http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim/2010/08/synchronization-in-vala.html

Vala 0.9.4 released

2010-07-27T20:42:00.004Z

Hello,

a new version of the Vala compiler has been released. This version does not introduce major features but mostly bug-fixes and Dova profile enhancements:

Append documentation comments to generated C files.
Skip <doc> tags in .gir files.
Various improvements to the Dova profile.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

As usual, you can find more information at live.gnome.org/Vala.

Vala 0.9.3 released and documentation news

2010-07-14T19:33:00.002Z

Hello,

this 0.9.3 release of the Vala programming language adds many interesting features as well as many bug fixes and binding improvements. Also I'd like to point you out to the new collaborative Vala Reference Manual and Hackers' Guide to Vala. The release notes:

Support newlines in double quoted string literals.
Add experimental support for main blocks.
Add experimental vala tool to compile and run code.
Initial support for generic delegates.
Support using GClosure for delegate parameters.
Support GBoxed-based memory management.
Improvements to the .gir reader and writer.
Various improvements to the Dova profile.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Check out the Vala home for more information and download.

Vala for scripting

2010-07-11T15:09:00.002Z

Hello,

the upcoming release of Vala will have basic scripting capability (mostly for small tests). Yes, this sounds weird, but it's more trivial than what you expect. The installation will create a symbolic link /usr/bin/vala -> /usr/bin/valac that you can use to run vala scripts.

Also, vala scripts can have implicit main(), so that it becomes faster to write test scripts. An example:

#!/usr/bin/env vala
message ("test");

Save it as test.vala, now you can either chmod +x test.vala and run ./test.vala or just vala test.vala.

Valac will automatically compile the script and run it. After that the executable will be deleted, which means there's no cache.

This feature is of course experimental and it's not currently possible to import other vala files.

Vala and Monads

2010-06-24T11:29:00.008Z

Hello,

I've been reading around lately about functional monads written in imperative languages, then I've tried to bring them to Vala. I'm not going to explain what a monad is, there's a lot of papers out there.

If you want to test the code below you need Vala git master (more recent than 0.9.2).

First of all we need a basic framework and some monads you can immediately read here.

Notice some comments are in do notation and that related functions are really only utilities to let the example code below be more readable, they respect the functional semantics of monads without adding more imperative power.

The only difference with other implementations is that BindFunc not only passes the underlying value but also the return function. This is helpful to avoid keeping monads around in termporary variables.

Now let's port some Haskell typic examples to Vala:

safe_div a b = if b == 0 then Nothing else Just (div a b)

Monad safe_div (int a, int b) { if (b == 0) return nothing; return new Just (a/b); }

The nothing variable is initialized with Nothing.instance which is a singleton.

Now let's map a simple multiplication function:

bind_and_mul monad factor = do { x <- monad; return (x*factor); }

Monad bind_and_mul (Monad monad, double factor) {

return monad.bind ((v,unit) => unit (((int)v) * factor)) as Monad;

}

Pretty easy, we get the unpacked value and multiply it with the given value.

Things get a bit longer with list monads. We want that given an x the function returns [x,x+1]:

bind_and_list_plus monad val = do { x <- monad; return [x,x+1]; }

Monad bind_and_list_plus (Monad monad, int val) {

return monad.bind ((x,unit) => {

var l = new List (); l.add (x); l.add (((int)x)+val); return unit(l);

});

}

Ok, but what is the result of those weird definitions?

Haskell: do { x <- safe_div 5 2; return (x*2); }

Vala: bind_and_mul (safe_div(5,2), 2);

Result: Just (4)

What if we divide by zero?

do { x <- safe_div 5 0; return (x*2); }

bind_and_mul (safe_div(5,0), 2);

Result: Nothing

Transform -10 into some useless list:

do { x <- -10; return [x,x+1]; }

bind_and_list_plus (new Just (-10), 1);

Result: [-10,-9]

Now do the same transformation for a list:

Haskell: do { x <- [1,2,3]; return [x,x+2]; }

Vala: var l = new List(); l.add(1); l.add(2); l.add(3);

bind_and_list_plus (l, 2);

Result: [[1,3],[2,4],[3,5]]

Again, the complete code with test cases can be found here.

Vala 0.9.2 has been released

2010-06-20T19:55:00.003Z

Hello,
this new release follows the huge changes coming along with GLib and GTK+ latest releases:

Initial support for GDBus-based clients and servers.
Support implicit and explicit GVariant casts.
Add support for [Deprecated] attribute.
Add GenericArray as alternative binding to GPtrArray.
Add gdk-pixbuf-3.0, gdk-3.0, gdk-x11-3.0, and gtk+-3.0 bindings.
Updates to the GLib bindings.
Many bug fixes.

Stay tuned with furter updates.

Vala 0.9.1 is out

2010-06-08T18:49:00.002Z

Hello,

yesterday the announce of the 0.9.1 release of Vala. You can find release notes here.

This is more like a transitional development release torward a new 0.8.x branch stable release.

Changes

Support constants in enums.
Deprecate +=/-= syntax to connect/disconnect signal handlers.
Add experimental support for Dova profile.
Update Genie parser (Jamie McCracken).
Add clutter-gst-1.0 bindings (Ali Sabil).
Add gdu and gdu-gtk bindings.
Add libesmtp bindings (Adrien Bustany).
Add mx-1.0 bindings (Evan Nemerson).
Add orc-0.4 bindings (Fabian Deutsch).
Add rest-extras-0.6 bindings (Adrien Bustany).
Updates to the GLib, GStreamer, Linux, SQLite, and other bindings.
Many bug fixes.

Post Vala 0.8.1 update

2010-05-27T18:08:00.004Z

Hello,
thanks to Jiří Zárevúcký for giving me the permission to write to this blog, this is my first post.

It's been at least a month since 0.8.1 has been released, and Vala is growing day by day. I'd like to share some news that will be available in the next release:

New regex literals
New libesmtp, mx-1.0, rest-extras and orc-0.4 bindings.
Improvements for sqlite3, alsa, libgdata and gstreamer-0.10 bindings
rest bindings renamed to rest-0.6
Several bug fixes for the compiler (especially for arrays, async and delegates), bindings and lots of other vapigen and vala-gen-introspect improvements.
Gtkdoc support for Valadoc.
And more...

Stay tuned!

Vala 0.8.0 Released!

2010-03-31T21:19:00.000Z

For the official release notes and download link, see http://live.gnome.org/Vala/Release ;)

Shotwell 0.5.0

2010-03-17T23:20:00.000Z

A few days back, a new version of Shotwell got released.
For those of you who don't know, Shotwell is a great open-source photo manager written in Vala.
The new version has some cool features, including but not limited to uploading photos to Picasa Web Albums. ;)

Read the full release announcement here:
http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim/2010/03/shotwell-050-released.html

To compare, or not to compare? That is a question for you

2010-02-18T03:22:00.004Z

Since I don't want to sleep yet, but don't have anything to do either, I thought I might as well start with the new, totally random single-topic approach to the Vala Journal.

A while ago (in the first attempt on this journal thingy to be precise), I noted a proposed feature of "complex conditionals". Since there hasn't been much response, it may be better to dedicate a post to it.

It all boils down to a single new added possibility - chain more relational operations in a single expression. Example: if you need to compare a variable to two values, you currently need to do this:

if (1 < a && a < 5) {}

Well, that doesn't look too bad, you're right. What about this?

if (0 < a && a < b && b < c && c < d && d < 255) {

    // do something 

} else {

    error ("Invalid data");

}

I don't know about you, but I think this is just evil.
Now, with the complex conditionals thingy, this would be possible:

if (1 < a < 5) {}

if (0 < a < b < c < d < 255) {

    // do something 

} else {

    error ("Invalid data");

}

Muuuuuch nicer. :)

However, Jürg suggested that there are more possible approaches to this problem. For example a range syntax:

if (a in [1..5]) {}

I don't find this possibility particularly bad, but it wouldn't allow any fancier chaining, like in my second example.

So, questions for you: What do you thing about it? Which one do you prefer? Do you have any other suggestions?

EDIT:
Ahh, forgot to link the bug report.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606480

Issue #3

2010-02-17T23:59:00.002Z

I apologize for being late with this one. The flu season has finally caught up with me, so I wasn't in a very good shape for writing long texts.

As I have found out recently, it's pointless to post a verbatim list of changes in git, since you can all see it at http://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/log. That means I'll just stick to stuff I find noteworthy, which will be a challenge since my memory sucks.

Alternatively, since I moved this to a blog, I can very well treat it as a blog and simply write about interesting things ad-hoc, instead of trying to summarize them once a week. That would be a lot better, I suppose. What do you think?

Anyway, there have been a lot of fixes again.
Among others, some threading-related functions have been added to the MainLoop bindings. Good for those of you who want to use async functions within threads. Also libpurple bindings have been added.

It is now possible to use the "in" operator with arrays, which is quite nice I think.
Somewhat related is that it's now possible to use a different iterator style, I quote: "If the iterator object has a .next_value() function that returns a nullable type then we iterate by calling this function until it returns null". This can be useful for containers that can't contain null value.

Some might also find interesting that "likely" and "unlikely" functions have been added to the GLib bindings, binding G_LIKELY and G_UNLIKELY macros. Along with that, "static_assert" was added for G_STATIC_ASSERT, which I find utterly useless in Vala as it would cause a GCC error.

Well, that's all for today. Have a good time hacking (in) Vala. ;)

Valadoc.org is back online

2010-02-08T18:09:00.001Z

After an unplanned "extended downtime", our lovely documentation site is back to its former glory.

Well, almost. Since the wiki style that allowed us to improve documentation was making the site incredibly slow, all pages are now static.

The site is now fast and the database is to be uploaded to a git repository as XML files, so changes will still be possible. It will be possible to download it and use locally, which is very nice.

Issue #2; the week after

2010-02-08T01:55:00.004Z

Ah, so it's a week already! The time sure flies by.

First of all, I'd like to say I'm reaaaally disappointed that there have been no comments since last Tuesday. Not to say that I haven't seen a single response regarding undecided features of the language!
If you like Vala, please go back to the first issue and skim over the "proposed features" and "opinions needed" parts. No bugzilla account? Doesn't matter, simply comment here or (if necessary) start a discussion on the mailing list. I'd hate having to do all that myself.

Since the Thursday release the waters of Vala are quite calm. Two git commit, no mind-numbing IRC discussions as far as I can tell. Though a very interesting article about Vala has been posted in the GNOME Journal (actually, until then I didn't know there is a GNOME Journal; otherwise I wouldn't choose such a ripoff name for this one :).

As all mailing-list subscribers already know, new version of Vala Toys for gEdit has been released today. Thank you so much! I'm not fan of bloated heavy-weight IDEs, so this really made my day. gEdit for president, huh?

Just today, sejerpz mentioned on the IRC that he's made a working port of GObject to Windows CE! I'm not too fond of the system, but I have to say that it's great news anyway. My dream of having Vala apps running on every thinkable piece of hardware is one step closer to reality.

Okay, so either I've forgotten any other noteworthy piece of information, or this is all there is to say today. As always, suggestions welcome.

By the way, I want to write up some definitive guide explaining delegates, signals, lambdas and closures in detail (down to the implementation specifics) and with a lot of examples. The same for async later. Any suggestions? Or do you think it is not necessary and that it is all well explained elsewhere?

------- GIT activity in the last week -------

Before the release:

7df67279	Do not check unexpected errors if there is a general catch clause (bug 608553)
79e7b46d	Do not check unexpected errors within finally blocks
e7314db8	Include string.h when using strcmp
9aa7997e	Fix symbol resolving in enums
7d7b02d0	Fix crash on invalid field initializer (bug 595725)
2ae8cd15	GAsync: Support async callback from closure (bug 608184)
e3a8480f	Fix symbol resolving for base types of structs (bug 607955)
0fffc0e8	D-Bus: Fix crash on properties without set accessors
09583398	Use intermediate variables to initialize static structs (bug 608250)
dc68bd9a	Fix GIR writing to only add lines for API dependencies
Bindings:
39d3c4d3	glib-2.0: Include stdlib.h when using abs function family
ea914d14	linux: bind mount(2) and friends as well as the rest of net/if.h, net/route.h
7887af51	dbus-glib-1: Fix type id of BusName
01438cc7	dbus-glib-1: Fix marshalling of ObjectPath
8586c7e1	posix: bind struct sockaddr_in
9a987307	libsoup-2.4: nullability fixes for Soup.MessageHeaders methods (bug 604907)

After the release:

3587d178	Fix crash when opening file fails (bug 606837)
75008bd5	Do not use string.replace

Vala 0.7.10 Released!

2010-02-05T19:40:00.006Z

Well, I'm a little late with this, but I guess you all already know.

This release is perhaps a bit different in that the timing has a very specific reason, which is the upcoming FOSDEM. Still, the amount of fixes since the last release is impressive. When you ask bugzilla, you'll see almost one hundred bugs fixed. That's very nice!
Everyone applaud to people who risk their hands and keyboards typing patches. :)

The official release notes are as follows:

Support coalescing operator ??.
Support to_string and bitwise complement with enums.
Return handler id when connecting signal handlers.
Support struct comparison.
Support constructor chaining in structs.
Enforce protected member restrictions.
Improve performance of flow analysis.
Support automatic line continuations in Genie.
Improvements to the .gir reader and writer.
Add --enable-mem-profiler commandline option.
Many bug fixes and binding updates.

Not so many surprises. Some of those I've already noted in the first issue of the Vala Journal, with the corresponding bug numbers.
By the way, the regressions I have noted are already fixed, though there is not as much activity from you regarding open questions.

What I find particularly interesting is the improved performance of flow analysis. Not so much because of it's benefits, but because I didn't really notice. Perhaps it's just me and my system, but compared to the time gcc consumes, I don't notice valac that much. Maybe I just need a faster C compiler. :) Does anyone have a different experience here?

On the other hand, automatic line continuations in Genie sound like an awesome enhancement for everyone using it. Too bad I don't use Genie (I get a rash from Python-like languages, nothing personal).

Well, and then there is the memory profiler support, which is great, though there seem to be problems when combined with multithreading. See bug 607973.

Big amount of various small fixes and improved bindings were committed as well, which is not that surprising. Not too much to be concerned about unless the particular bug affected you (in which case you probably know already).

Ah! And valadoc.org is still offline, but hopefully, weekend will change that.

Issue #1; introduction, questions and whatever

2010-02-03T16:17:00.002Z

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

Let there be light

2010-02-03T16:09:00.002Z

So, a few days back, I started with an idea of a periodic summary of what is going on around the Vala programming language, mainly for those subscribed to the mailing list who are not that much interested in bugzilla.

The original idea was to write it weekly and post it on the Vala mailing list. However, a few people asked me whether I shouldn't use some more public location instead.

That is actually a very good idea, for several reasons:

not everyone interested in Vala is subscribed to the list
even when they are, they probably don't read all the messages
making the journal blog-based will give me much more flexibility

As you might have guessed, this blog is the answer to those questions. What I am unsure about at the moment is whether to post messages to the list as well, or just a link, or not at all.
The obvious benefit of posting *something* to the list is that various issues noted in the journal can be discussed on the mailing list in a single thread. Doing that using comments on a blog would suck.

For now I'll simply re-post the first issue and see what happens. :)