A GNOME Developer's Arguments On Vala Being A "Dead" Language

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A GNOME Developer's Arguments On Vala Being A "Dead" Language

Longtime GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi has pleaded his case that Vala is a "dead" language and that new applications/developers should look at alternatives or first work on improving this GNOME-centered language...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Vala-Bassi

[lunarcloud]

Isn't ElementaryOS entirely built and based off of Vala?

https://developer.elementary.io/

What does this mean for that team?

[Sergey]

Isn't ElementaryOS entirely built and based off of Vala?

https://developer.elementary.io/

What does this mean for that team?

I guess they will switch to Qt as Solus project did.

[dh04000]

Isn't ElementaryOS entirely built and based off of Vala?

https://developer.elementary.io/

What does this mean for that team?

They'll have to support the language long term, I imagine,

[TingPing]

Isn't ElementaryOS entirely built and based off of Vala?

https://developer.elementary.io/

What does this mean for that team?

They are effectively the maintainer of it now, so if they are fine with the lack of good tooling then they will continue to be fine with it. If any breakage happens their release cycle will account for it and they will probably know about it.

The problem is for new contributors who think Vala is a great idea to make a new project and not realize it has all these dark corners that can make it painful to use and maintain long term.

[c117152]

Midori, the web browser, also uses lots of Vala for extensions and whatnot...

[emblemparade]

Sigh. It pains me to agree with him, because I've also invested a lot in Genie/Vala. But he's right: the tooling and maturity are just not there, and there's no hope that things will move along any faster. Meanwhile, Rust can give many of the benefits of Vala (though not all) with so many other benefits, especially tremendous support from the industry. I'm already looking into translating a big GTK project from Genie to Rust.

The GNOME community should cut their losses and invest in making Rust a 1st-class GObject provider/consumer.

[tuuker]

Time to switch to world most widespread and stable toolkit, QT.

[schmidtbag]

I don't see a problem with this. There are way too many languages out there, most of which have nothing significant to offer. After skimming through the wikipedia article for Vala, I couldn't find any real redeeming qualities for it.
For those of you who are like "why does it matter? What harm comes out of something like this?" just read the other comments here and you'll get your answer - there are real-world projects that are forced to be obsoleted or need to be re-written. On the other hand, these projects should've had the foresight to know that they were getting into something obscure and risky.

[JonathanM]

QT isn't a language, so suggesting to move to it isn't really helpful and I would be really surprised if elementary OS switched to it.

This language doesn't have any direct alternatives for its purpose and I would prefer it if it could live on.
I am maintainer of an application written in Vala, so I care about this. If nothing happens to improve this situation, I'm not going to keep using a dying language. The compiler will continue to function and the language will probably continue to suffice for this small piece of software, but it would be nice if people can contribute without having to learn a niche language with waning prospects.

I will continue to watch this situation for a while longer, but I'm losing my optimism.