What are the main advantages, or otherwise, of developing with Vala? [closed]

Question

I read its documentation and it seems quite awesome. But I never heard of any application developed using it.

What are the main advantages and disadvantage of Vala?

Sherwood

Half of all new desktop applications for GNOME are developed using Vala, probably the most high-profile being Cheese (the webcam booth) and Shotwell (the photo manager). See the last section of this page for a list of Vala success stories. Other than that, your question is really too broad to answer; perhaps you should change it to be more specific. – Rink

Answer 1

(IMO) advantages:

• No garbage collector!
• generated programs are written in C which should boost performance and require less resources than other scripting languages (python) or managed code (Mono).
• Provide easy to use API to a huge variety of useful libraries available in Linux written mostly in C.
• Provide a C#-like syntax which is very popular and by doing so attract new developers to OSS programming.
• Bring (some level of) OOP syntactic sugar into the world of C but easier to use than C++.

disadvantage:

• No garbage collector!
• Generated program should be recompiled for each architecture.
• It's a young language. Language specifications and API change constantly. Maintaining a big project might require extra attention.
• Debugging is possible but a bit tricky.
• No stable IDE and tools yet. Valide crashes a lot and vtg too.
• Language object model is based on glib/gobject which seem to be limited. Dova is being developed to explore an alternative path but will not be compatible with gobjects.

Deeann

Just to clarify (for future readers), even it doesn't have a garbage collector, it has a reference-counting mechanism that can achieve the same results. While it is more efficient, it requires to follow some simple rules, which if not followed, may produce memory leaks. – Claude

+1: I would say that Debugging and unstable IDEs are the main disadvantages today (as it is a young language this will definitely change in the near future). – Claude

Working on an IDE as we speak. christophertimberlake.com/post/39654584097/… – Marotta