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by prince781 1874 days ago
> gnome project felt that they had to n.i.h. an entire programming language.

This isn't what happened. When Vala came out (2006), it was at the time the only programming language advertising such high-level concepts as found in C# (like async/await) while guaranteeing you native performance without a VM. At the time it was billed as a better C++ and a faster C#. When the elementary project adopted Vala (2007), Swift and Rust weren't things, and they would remain unstable for at least the next decade.

Today the world has changed, and while I'd argue that Rust is one of the best languages invented, Vala still has some things over it: easier to learn, binds well with C and a million other languages, faster compilation and a simpler toolchain, has built-in type annotations for Gtk and DBus, all while guaranteeing you native performance.
1 comments
j-pb 1874 days ago
You admittedly made me change my mind a bit about Vala. Apparently it was ahead of it's time, which is a bit sad. Nevertheless, elementary is the closest thing I know to a working open-source desktop OS, and Vala hinders it's adoption.

At some point you gotta pick the hill you're gonna die on, and that shouldn't be dev mind-share.

The horse they bet on didn't make it, why fall into the sunken cost trap, either bet on a different horse (rust), or pick a tried and true one (C) and write a decent FFI for alternative languages.

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prince781 1874 days ago
It's not sunken cost. Vala is performant, plays well with a multitude of languages, doesn't require a VM, and makes it easy to write Gtk applications. Unlike Rust it's very simple to learn and the elementaryOS project likes it for that reason since it lowers the barrier to entry for app developers. Based on this I'd say it's still got a lot of things going for it.

Now is there more to improve? Absolutely. Despite its use by users, development of the language itself suffers from chronic underinvestment. But I think that's changing a bit recently. (Full disclosure: I'm involved in developing the language and tooling. We could always use more contributors.)

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