Maintainers behind Vala compiler, have been busy this cycle.
Vala has a continuous integration machinery, so new features are added to staging branch before to land in master, in order to check some Vala projects can be compiled and their unit tests pass.
Expect more Vala improvements, fixes and backports to 0.34 and 0.36, so you can use them in your favorite distribution.
While 0.34 haven’t been officially declared as a long term support branch, it has received most fixes and backports, so stable releases, like Debian upcoming Strech, can provide reliable, stable and improved experience to developers targeting GNOME 3.22/Gtk+ 3.22 stable releases.
Vala’s bindings using GIR format are updated constantly and because them can be generated automatically from project’s sources, new API additions/changes land in master really fast. Is the case of GTK+ 4.0 unstable; allowing you to create testing/prototypes using latest hot GTK+’s new features, using Vala.
Highlights:
- gobject-2.0: Add GLib.ParamSpecPointer
- The CCode attribute ‘cname’ needs to be the canonical representation as it is expected in C. [Bug 731547]
- gio-2.0: Use default ‘length = null’ for DataInputStream.read_line_utf8* [Bug 783351]
- gvariant: Optimize (de)serialization of arrays with type-signature “ay” [Bug 772426]
- Added –gresourcesdir switch, making easy to use gresg to autogenerate XML resource files in out of tree builds [Bug 783133]
- Bindings updates
- Gtk+ 4.0 bindings updates
- codegen: Use *_free_full to free GLib.List, GLib.SList and GLib.Queue
- Require and target GLib >= 2.40 [Bug 782005]
- gdbus: Don’t leak nested HashTable on deserialization and make sure types derived from string are freed, e.g. ObjectPath [Bug 782719]
- codegen: Fix finally blocks with async yields [Bug 741929]
- compiler: Add –color=WHEN option following the format of other tools like diff and git-diff.
-
glib-2.0: Add quark() functions to errordomains
-
vala: Handle non-null in coalescing expression [Bug 611223]
-
glib-2.0: Add bindings for g_ptr_array_find/_find_with_equal_func()