Abstract nonsense

My last post about vala was seen by some as a little trollish. I must admit that the title was a silly joke, and the closing suggestion about rewriting parts of gtk+ with it was a little far-fetched.

But still, given the choice between on the one hand :

• writing 1000 lines of code
• maintaining all of them myself
• using a community-written toolchain

and on the other hand :

• writing 10 lines of of vala code
• maintaining those myself
• using another community-written toolchain

I wouldn’t hesitate a second! After all, I’m used to writing things in a language, and expecting the toolchain to give something correct with it. And this expectation is generally met.

Of course, you’ll notice I wrote “toolchain” and not just “compiler” — indeed, as noted for example by Dodji of nemiver fame, having a good preprocessor is good as long as you are able to debug your source, and not your preprocessed source.

So vala is lacking a suitable debugger. That will indeed hinder its use on a large, serious scale. But what they have already is certainly enough to have some fun, and as such, I have high hopes said debugger will just pop in existence one day.

So while my work on ekiga now uses C++/sigc++ and not C/GObject anymore, which means I probably won’t contribute to this undertaking, it certainly doesn’t mean the vala project is uninteresting — nor that I am uninterested.

Don’t we know another little opensource desktop project which uses a preprocessor, although being C++-based, by the way?