[Geany-Devel] Let's use Vala

[Matthew Brush]

On 13-11-10 11:48 AM, Matthew Brush wrote:
> On 13-11-10 11:45 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
>> Am 10.11.2013 20:27, schrieb Matthew Brush:
>>> On 13-11-10 07:40 AM, Colomban Wendling wrote:
>>>> Le 10/11/2013 05:44, Matthew Brush a écrit :
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> In the spirit of the previous discussions about using C99 and C++ in
>>>>> Geany code with similar subject lines, I'd like to take a
>>>>> poll/discussion for allowing the use of Vala for new/re-written Geany
>>>>> code. [...]
>>>>
>>>> Well… it's a little complicated.  I agree that features from a
>>>> higher-level language could help, it being C++, Vala or something.
>>>> It's
>>>> definitely shorter to write some things in those languages than in C,
>>>> and memory management is definitely easier.  I see one advantage in
>>>> Vala
>>>> over C++: that it actually is C ([1]), just like our current code.
>>>>
>>>> I agree that Vala would help if we want to port the code to something
>>>> more OOP-style -- since obviously the language supports it by
>>>> itself.  I
>>>> agree it's probably a good idea.  But the port won't happen magically.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Agreed, but one of the reasons I created this thread is to get
>>> agreement that we *can* use Vala and then when we do any refactoring,
>>> it makes it that much easier. I'm sure you already know I'm bringing
>>> this topic up because I'm willing to do a lot of the work :)
>>>
>>>> The problem I see is that using C from Vala requires a more or less
>>>> manual interfacing, even if quite easy to write.  This adds actual
>>>> complexity.  We could try by porting leaf modules to Vala and see
>>>> (maybe
>>>> utils?) -- since calling Vala API from C is native --, but it's
>>>> probably
>>>> not the modules that would benefit the most from the language.
>>>>
>>>
>>> This was my same thought. There are lots of "modules" in Geany that
>>> could benefit from re-factorings, but even starting with some of the
>>> low hanging fruit like utils, uiutils, any of the existing GObjects,
>>> including geanyobject.c which as a demo, I converted to Vala reducing
>>> the lines of code count from around 400+ to around 40:
>>>
>>> Before:
>>> https://gist.github.com/codebrainz/7274867
>>>
>>> After:
>>> https://gist.github.com/codebrainz/7274865
>>
>> Error 500 :(
>>
>
> Yeah, same here, I was hoping it would be back up by the time people
> visited or wasn't down for them :) I'm sure it'll come back online soon.

Maybe it's something specific to that Gist, so I re-pasted it in a new one:

https://gist.github.com/codebrainz/7403171

Cheers,
Matthew Brush