Vala 0.14.1 released

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

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:

• About discouraged copy of delegates
• About libvala breakage, command "valac file.vapi" breakage and warnings for out parameters

More information at the Vala homepage.

Vala 0.13.4 has been released

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

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

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

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

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.