Why vala? Was - Re: ffalarms 0.2.3 Vala/libeflvala/Elementary rewrite

[Łukasz Pankowski]

"Steven **" <montgoss at gmail.com> writes:

> I've seen several developers talking about porting things to vala.
> I'm not really familiar with this language.  What is the point?  Why
> would you spend the effort rewriting an app that already works into
> another language when the result is identical to the original?  Is
> vala really that much easier to program in that C?  Łukasz, was it
> worth all that time to rewrite ffalarms (which is a great app)?
>
> Just wondering if I should be paying more attention to this vala
> stuff...

For sure Vala is worth looking at...

I started ffalarms with (excelant language) Python which is my language
of choice mostly for small scripts and numerical calculations with numpy
and my own lib.

Found Vala on the way, which is a high level language -- I have not
needed Python dynamic nature in ffalarms, apart from simple convienience
(no variable declarations and monkey typing).  Vala adds speed and
smaller memory footprint and easier interfacing with C libraries which I
hope to use soon (though it is also convenient in Python when using
Pyrex/Cython).

I decided it is good to learn Vala and there is no better way to do that
than write some real program, and here comes the rewrite.  Such a
rewrite is also good to check how much you miss constructs from the
previous language in the new one.  It takes some time to get used to it
(like with any language).  I am not a great fan of verbose names so I
defined Emacs abbrevs for some common names such as

prn -> stdout.printf
getenv -> Environment.get_variable

>
> -Steven
>
> 2009/6/28 Łukasz Pankowski <lukpank at o2.pl>:
>> Hi
>>
>> I have just released ffalarms 0.2.3.  Features:
>>
>> - rewritten using Vala/libeflvala/Elementary (same features as 0.2.2)
>> [...]
>>
>> Rewrite in Vala took much of my available time.  I hope to add recursive
>> alarms, but you know well my time limited, slow rate of development :).