Comments for Jürg Billeter's blog

Comment on Vala 0.3.3 by juergbi

juergbi — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:29:05 +0000

You can manually manage memory by using raw pointers in Vala. Inline assembler is not supported. However, you can declare a method as `extern’ in the Vala source code and implement it in a .c file where you can use inline assembler.

Comment on Vala 0.3.3 by dave berk

dave berk — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:19:36 +0000

Is there a way to manually manage memory and/or embed asm inside?

Comment on Vala 0.3.3 by Jamie McCracken

Jamie McCracken — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:26:16 +0000

ac,

I doubt you could write something more pythonic than say the boo language and genie is not far off from boo.

Comment on Vala 0.3.3 by ac

ac — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:06:50 +0000

I hope someone write a really pythonic vala dialect because genie definitely is not pythonic.

Comment on Vala 0.3.3 by Philip Van Hoof

Philip Van Hoof — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:35:25 +0000

Thanks Jürg.

Comment on Vala 0.3.3 by n'qullo

n'qullo — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:07:53 +0000

Great news! Thank you!
I love vala.

Comment on Vala 0.3.1 by Mike

Mike — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:43:53 +0000

Just wanted to let you know that I’m your fan. I believe Vala is important.

Comment on Vala Roadmap and 0.2.0 by juergbi

juergbi — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:29:49 +0000

@jamie
There is very little code in the Vala parser that could be reused for a parser for a different language. Most of the code in the parser is closely tied to the syntax. Language-independent code parts are in the many other classes, which can be reused, of course.
Integrating the parser for a Boo-like language into libvala and valac would be fine, assuming it’s actively maintained. I assume you also want extended support for type inference, this will require enhancements to libvala but I don’t see any fundamental issues.

Comment on Vala Roadmap and 0.2.0 by Jamie McCracken

Jamie McCracken — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:08:47 +0000

juergbi,

Ive been looking at doing that (boo language) for vala.

Main problem is you cant use lex/flex for block indentation as lex can only return one token per parsed value (EG you might need to return multiple dedents on a newline which lex cant do). Could do it by preprocessing the source of course prior to lex but that would make things slower…

If a hand written parser is going to be done for vala then it would make sense to do something similar for a boo language. Would be great if the parser you are going to write had a featureful parent class to allow other langs to reuse that code

Also would be ideal to have all the languages within vala so that valac can compile different src files in different langs (valac simply calls the right parser based on file extension of src file) - the only difference between the languages would be the lexer/parser so wont complicate things too much nor require too many changes. Implementing it externally via libvala would forego those advantages and be problematic too unless libvala was abi stable.

jamie

Comment on Vala Roadmap and 0.2.0 by juergbi

juergbi — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:06:49 +0000

@ac
Writing a new parser doesn’t mean that we want to change the language. Supporting two fundamentally different syntax styles in the same language would probably cause more problems than it would solve. However, it wouldn’t be that difficult to write a parser for a new language with Python/Boo-like syntax and use libvala as a compiler library, if there is interest in that.