My Wandering Days Are Over

This weekend I’ve finally tried Vala, something I wanted to do for a while now. Vala is, for those of you that never tried it, like GOB, but on PCP and steroids and with a syntax that doesn’t make using it feel like you’re being skull-raped through your eye sockets. It’s, actually, quite a pleasant experience – if you ignore the utter brain damage of connecting signals by overloading the plus operator ((which is more a fault of C# than anything, and one of the reasons operator overloading should be banished using necromancy. Come on: signal = signal + handler? Really?)).

Surely, there are a couple of issues with the underlying C translation layer:

• connecting signals passes the class instance pointer, but if your class does not have any property then an empty struct will be generated, which doesn’t create valid C code;
• if you then add a dummy int, the passed pointer is still called “self” but it’s never allocated, because the Vala compiler still expects for the class to inherit from GLib.Object in this case, while it really shouldn’t;
• so, if you want to connect to signals, you have to make your class inherit from Object, create an instance and connect to the signals in the constructor or inside a method;

The last point is a perfectly legitimate choice to be made by language designers: but, then, this snippet:

using GLib;
using Gdict;

class TestSource {
  void on_definition_found (Gdict.Context context, Gdict.Definition definition) {
    stdout.printf ("*definition for `%s' found:\n%s\n",
                   definition.get_word(),
                   definition.get_text());
  }
  static void main (string[] args) {
    var loop = new GLib.MainLoop (null, false);
    var context = new Gdict.ClientContext ("dict.org", 2628);

    context.definition_found += on_definition_found;
    try {
      context.define_word ("*", "dictionary");
   } catch (Glib.Error e) { warning (e.message); }

    loop.run ();
  }
}

should fail to compile in Vala, and not in produce invalid C code ((I think this stems from the fact that Vala, like C#, allows a mixed OO-procedural approach, like Perl and Python; but those languages usually get it right)).

Anyway, Vala is an interesting project. If it had a better integration with the rest of the toolchain (gdb, valgrind, autotools, profilers, etc.) it should definitely become one of the first class citizens of GNOME ((for instance, Apple has native Objective-C support, and that is a layer above C like Vala)).

By the way, just to try out Vala I wrote the bindings for the Gdict API. They are mostly working, so if you want to check them out, you can clone the repository here:

  git clone http://www.gnome.org/~ebassi/git/gdict-vala.git

Those are the bindings for the unstable version of Gdict, which will be released for GNOME 2.20.