While some will argue that GNOME's Vala is a "dead" language, there still are active contributors and today they released version 0.36.

Vala 0.36 includes an updated manual, various code support changes, support for the \v escape character, an explicit copy method for arrays, allow underscores in type parameter names, and quite a number of fixes.

More details on Vala 0.36 can be found via this blog post by GNOME developer Daniel Espinosa while a complete list of changes for v0.36 can be found via the NEWS file in Git.