Wednesday, January 27, 2016

What's up with Vala?

The vala landscape is strewn with abandonware. The Gnomite wiki has more dead links than a Gnecrominicon. Vala 1.0 , the next version afer 0.4 never materialized, and the roadmap this link refers to is now itself just another dead link.

But something is happening - Geary is built with Vala, as is the ElementaryOS desktop that I currently love. Version 0.30 was release last fall (still no version 1.0). So there must be something to this. Right?

Maybe - if there were some viable tooling. I spent about a week trying to get various dev tools from Gnome to work. Only 1 would actually install and run - Valama - and it is very unfinished. There is always Geany, but that is so last millenia.

So I've decided that it's best for me to ignore all of that Gnomite stuff. I'm starting over using Atom. I've installed the language-vala plugin. I'm using my own simple make script, and run it using atom-buil plugin. I modified autocomplete-clang to include vala - (You're welcome to try it, but I'll warn you that it, too, is unfinished. But then, the bar is pretty low :)) - And I'm just now starting to get productive.

Now I'm trying to find a unit test that actually works. Honestly - is there any other language whose ecosystem is in such shabby state? It is said that there are 2 kinds of computer languages. The ones that everyone complains about, and the ones that no one uses. Maybe there just haven't been enough complaints about  Vala.

2 comments:

  1. Valadate is nice for Unit testing. And honestly, people at Gnome hate Vala. Some of them hated it from the beginning, others just started to hate it after the decision to make GJS the recommended option. They'l tell you to not use Vala, it has no tooling, it's a waste of time, etc; and then "jeez, Vala sure has no new contributors, i guess it's dead :-)". Honestly Vala IS a faiure, because it was created for a community that hates it. The whole elementary OS thing wth Vala was a surprise, yes, but not enough to get people interested n Vala development. I'll suport Vala whie it works, and move n if it's declared dead, because i lack the knowedge and skill to tackle on compiler programming.

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