[Geany-Devel] Let's use Vala

Lex Trotman elextr at xxxxx
Mon Nov 11 22:04:01 UTC 2013


On 12 November 2013 03:38, Steven Blatnick <steve8track at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Disclaimer: I know little to nothing about Vala.
>
> I like how lean Geany is.  From the discussion, it sounds like Vala does
> its own memory management.  Currently geany only uses between 9 and 13 MB
> of memory on my box.  Would Vala inadvertantly make geany use more memory?
>  I don't want to use much more of my GBs of memory ;-)
>

Despite what the fans say, Vala does not really do "memory management" in
any way different to a C program, but the Vala compiler does write the
"free" calls that C programmers forget (and that there has been a bit of a
pogrom on lately :).  It also uses reference counting for objects that
support it (in current Geany thats mostly the GUI widgets).  So long as any
re-design did not go overboard with the use of such features just because
they are there, and are easier to use than in C, then it shouldn't use
appreciably more memory.

What it does not do is use garbage collection like Java and therefore
Eclipse.

Cheers
Lex


>
> Changing languages almost always adds complexity and my humble opinion is
> that it should be avoided, but I also don't know enough about vala to say
> how easy it would be to include it in development.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Steve
>
>
> On 11/10/2013 12:22 PM, Matthew Brush wrote:
>
>> On 13-11-10 02:00 AM, Pavel Roschin wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe, rewriting some parts of boating complicated leaky code (e.g.
>>> build.c:)
>>> isn't bad idea and suitable in this situation. You don't need much
>>> bindings for
>>> editor and Vala shouldn't be a pain. But AFAIK Geany don't use
>>> GObject and
>>> writing on Vala may cause deep refactoring that will take your time.
>>> Many things
>>> in Geany could be rewritten, simplified and improved and it's
>>> definitely going
>>> to be refactoring while using Vala.
>>>
>>> To improve maintainability pure C code could be pre-generated before
>>> release
>>> for faster and easier build without vala.
>>>
>>>
>> Yep, this is the default for the Autotools built-in support as well,
>> so no extra work to do it.
>>
>>   From the other side you could scare good C programmers...
>>>
>>>
>> True, but I suspect good C programmers will have little trouble with a
>> simple language like Vala.
>>
>>  About RHEL: defenitely can say that Vala 0.20 works. And some things
>>> could be
>>> easily compiled.
>>>
>>>
>> Cool, good to know.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Matthew Brush
>>
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>
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