GNOME's Vala 0.36 Released

[rastersoft]

Vala is a GNOME-only thing

Error: vala apps work with other desktops perfectly. Vala doesn't need GNOME specific technologies (and no, Gtk is not "a GNOME technology". GNOME uses it, like other desktops and applications).

[ldo17]

The .NET Framework will still be maintained, but the future of .NET is in .NET Core.

Sounds like you are setting yourself up for yet another legacy millstone around your neck, five years down the track.

Remember what happened to Silverlight, WinRT, UWP and all those other little dead-end distractions that Microsoft pursued for a while, before losing interest? While never getting around to admitting that they were actually dead ends?

[Electric-Gecko]

I knew about Vala, but I didn't realize that it was centred on Gnome. I thought that it was supposed to be like a potential replacement for C++, much like D (although with a different approach).

Too bad, as I was curious about it. I thought that having it compile to C would make it easy to interface with other languages, and I am interested in potential successors to C++. But I would like to see a systems programming language that compiles into C.

[uid313]

Sounds like you are setting yourself up for yet another legacy millstone around your neck, five years down the track.

Remember what happened to Silverlight, WinRT, UWP and all those other little dead-end distractions that Microsoft pursued for a while, before losing interest? While never getting around to admitting that they were actually dead ends?

The .NET Framework has been around for 15 years.

[patstew]

I don't know on Linux and macOS. On Linux perhaps its mostly used for hosting web applications written in ASP.NET Core MVC.
On Windows, I guess everyone will be moving away from .NET to .NET Core.
The .NET Framework will still be maintained, but the future of .NET is in .NET Core.
C# is a very nice programming language, and the .NET Core is a very nice framework, so GObject Introspection for .NET Core would be awesome.

It is hard to find developers with experience in Vala, since its a GNOME-only thing, so few people have any interest to learn it.
C# on .NET Core would be a nice platform for writing GTK+ applications, much nicer than C, Python or Vala.
Much faster development than C, also much safer and less bugs due to garbage collection.
Much safer than Python due to static type checking.
Much more mature, diverse, general and viable than Vala.

C# is a terrible language that marries the speed of a high level language with the syntax of C and SQL mushed together. Its popularity is down to a broad and well documented standard library, Visual Studio and it being pushed as the standard API for windows programs.
The open sourced core doesn't include huge chunks of the libraries (e.g. GUI), and there is no full fat VS for linux so it's much less compelling on non windows platforms.

[ldo17]

The .NET Framework has been around for 15 years.

But Dotnet Core has not.

Wasn’t Silverlight also supposed to be a kind of Dotnet Lite?

Seems like Dotnet Core is Dotnet Lite Strike 2...

[uid313]

C# is a terrible language that marries the speed of a high level language with the syntax of C and SQL mushed together. Its popularity is down to a broad and well documented standard library, Visual Studio and it being pushed as the standard API for windows programs.
The open sourced core doesn't include huge chunks of the libraries (e.g. GUI), and there is no full fat VS for linux so it's much less compelling on non windows platforms.

C# is compiled and statically typed and hence probably faster than most high level languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, Lua, Tcl, Perl, etc.
The syntax of C# is more akin to that of Java than to C.
Yes, it unfortunately have some syntax akin to SQL built-in, although I never really use it, I use LINQ using method chaining.

Yes, it lacks support for GUI because WinForms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) makes use of native Windows technologies such as GDI and Win32 which are non-portable.

Yes, full fat VS unfortunately isn't available because its not portable. However there is Visual Studio Code, as well as MonoDevelop / Xamarin Studio.

[uid313]

But Dotnet Core has not.

Wasn’t Silverlight also supposed to be a kind of Dotnet Lite?

Seems like Dotnet Core is Dotnet Lite Strike 2...

Silverlight was more of a competitor to Adobe Flash than some dotnet lite.
There is .NET Micro Framework which is dotnet light.

Silverlight was some closed source web plugin technology.
.NET Core is a open source, cross-platform, standardized platform. So it is a bad comparison.

[patstew]

C# is compiled and statically linked and hence probably faster than most high level languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, Lua, Tcl, Perl, etc.
The syntax of C# is more akin to that of Java than to C.
Yes, it unfortunately have some syntax akin to SQL built-in, although I never really use it, I use LINQ using method chaining.

Yes, it lacks support for GUI because WinForms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) makes use of native Windows technologies such as GDI and Win32 which are non-portable.

Yes, full fat VS unfortunately isn't available because its not portable. However there is Visual Studio Code, as well as MonoDevelop / Xamarin Studio.

It is faster than those languages, but nobody uses those languages for performance critical code. You use them for rapid development of scripts. The problem is that people think that C# is basically as fast as C++ when it isn't.
I used to work at an embedded electrionics company where the software department decided to write everything in C#, "because it's practically native speed and so much faster to write". To cut a very long story short, the software they produced needed an i5 level processor to run properly, when we had a prototype in C doing most of the same stuff running on a crappy ARM at a few hundred MHz. All the time they saved implementing functionality was wasted again trying to optimise and fix random performance and latency issues.
Allocating practically everything on the heap and garbage collection are both big fundamental performance problems with C#, and they only bite you when you've already written a big program in it, not so much on little benchmarks. There are other fundamental design problems, like garbage collection causing indeterminate object lifetime, which means that all resources need to be IDisposable and be explicitly closed. It has also gone very quickly from brand new language to heap of legacy stuff cobbled together that wasn't really planned for with the addition of generics, linq, async etc.
Having said all that there is some good in it. I wish C++ had reflection. And it is a reasonable choice for writing windows only GUI applications. It's just stuck in a bit of a no mans land between C/C++/Rust on the one hand and Python/Ruby/etc on the performance/fast to write spectrum.

[ldo17]

C# is compiled and statically linked ...

No support for shareable libraries?