Will Vala survive? [closed]

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I'm just wondering how the Vala project is coming along. I'm not sure if this will be a great new technology or just one that will fall by the wayside. Does anyone know how many people are working on this project and if I can contribute (writing tutorials, reporting/fixing bugs, etc...)?

Mazurek answered 18/3, 2009 at 1:33 Comment(2)

Was something wrong with cfront? – Robby 27/2, 2011 at 18:3

future calling, It's still alive:p – Wagner 11/9, 2016 at 5:0

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It's open source, so it cannot die. That said, there are plenty of people (myself included) that love c#, but would also love to be able to get maximum performance from their hardware. This lets you do that while using your favorite language. I can't see something like this dieing.

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Also, I don't program for embedded devices, but I imagine with something like this opens up c# and all the benefits it brings to a different class of platform. That's gotta generate some interest.

Nonpros answered 18/3, 2009 at 1:37 Comment(10)

That's using a pretty loose definition of "software death." – Sheryl 18/3, 2009 at 1:39

@BobbyShaftoe: Yeah, I know. I guess I hang out at slashdot too much... anytime someone mentions "die" and "open source" in the same syntax they blurt out what I said. But IMO this thing is too cool to die out. – Nonpros 18/3, 2009 at 1:43

@Giovanni Galbo: I was hoping people wouldn't say that this would die out. I just wish it had, like a 50 member team to update and fix any problems. – Mazurek 18/3, 2009 at 1:49

@Lucas: To be fair, the first release (alpha I guess) was released in December, so the momentum probably isn't there yet. – Nonpros 18/3, 2009 at 1:51

...also take a look at the changeset... there were checkins TODAY. They're actively working on it! – Nonpros 18/3, 2009 at 1:52

@Giovanni Galbo: Thats nice to know, I'm gonna have to look at the changeset. Thanks! – Mazurek 18/3, 2009 at 2:3

Regarding embedded devices: when doing embedded programming, the reason you normally use C is because you must also use the compiler provided by the device vendor. If the vendor won't even support C++, they're unlikely to add Vala. – Ceramic 18/3, 2009 at 2:39

You don't need the vendor to add Vala support -- Vala preprocesses (err, "compiles") into C. – Choroid 18/3, 2009 at 2:43

I like Vala because it means I can do something advanced on Linux without having to pay homage to Microsoft through Mono/C#, which seems sacrilegious, and which seems more logical to me than using Python. I do Python work only because I might have to, but prefer PHP or C. I'm not excellent at C, so Vala looks like the next best thing. So, I hope this Vala survives and grows. – Tintometer 5/7, 2010 at 2:56

It's 2013 and Vala is alive and kicking. ;) – Fricandeau 6/6, 2013 at 13:54

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If you check the metrics for the Vala project you can see that it had a very strong growth pattern from the very start. Not only is it open source but there are more and more developers contributing to it over time, more and more people taking dependencies on it etc.

You can click the links "Very large, active development team" and "Established codebase" to see what these tags mean in terms in numbers compared to other open source projects.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/vala

Domineca answered 3/10, 2009 at 10:51 Comment(0)

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Considering the abundance of GNU/Linux software that's being written in Vala, I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon:

Mayo answered 25/3, 2011 at 18:10 Comment(0)

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It's looking quite good and this was one of my concerns before starting. I've started, two weeks in, I think things are looking quite healthy.

Smallscale answered 13/6, 2009 at 2:13 Comment(0)

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Chances are excellent that Vala has a prosperous future:

Let's talk about GNOME only for a while. If you monitor the GNOME contributors landscape, you will notice that a lot of new people are entering the scene that do not adhere to the "real man code in C" principle. Those folks have grown up with high level languages, such as Python and Ruby, and these kind of people you scare away with the massive amount of boiler plate code that is necessary to write gobject-code. Even quite a bunch of older GNOME projects are moving to Vala.

Vala does not only shine for UI-code though, it is a very good choice for everyone who wants the speed of compiled code plus the abstraction of a modern object-oriented language. Especially the support for closures and coroutines allows to write algorithms in a very clear and concise way. Not that you can't do that with C++, but it's more cumbersome.

Last but not least, there is work underway that makes Vala useful without relying on the gobject libraries – the so called "posix" profile implements a limited amount of features that would allow you to write kernel modules or code for embedded CPUs (think Atmel) with Vala.

Maimonides answered 23/11, 2011 at 9:54 Comment(2)

ban you not write kernel code using the gObject libs? – Incubate 9/6, 2012 at 7:54

@thelaststud: Unfortunately not, gobject requires a runtime c library such as glibc (for malloc and free at least, but actually a lot more), which you certainly don't have available in kernel space. You could have a look at klibc, but it's not the same. – Maimonides 13/6, 2012 at 7:22

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If you check the Linux Desktop scenario, every 2nd new app seems to be written in Vala. Vala is fast becoming the language of choice on Linux desktop at least.

Fingerbreadth answered 27/2, 2011 at 18:0 Comment(2)

I mean every 2nd new popular app. :P – Fingerbreadth 27/2, 2011 at 18:1

[citation-needed] – Mazurek 28/2, 2011 at 0:8

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