I'm just wondering how the Vala project is coming along. I'm not sure if this will be a great new technology or just one that will fall by the wayside. Does anyone know how many people are working on this project and if I can contribute (writing tutorials, reporting/fixing bugs, etc...)?
+8
A:
It's open source, so it cannot die. That said, there are plenty of people (myself included) that love c#, but would also love to be able to get maximum performance from their hardware. This lets you do that while using your favorite language. I can't see something like this dieing.
Edit
Also, I don't program for embedded devices, but I imagine with something like this opens up c# and all the benefits it brings to a different class of platform. That's gotta generate some interest.
Giovanni Galbo
2009-03-18 01:37:12
That's using a pretty loose definition of "software death."
BobbyShaftoe
2009-03-18 01:39:41
@BobbyShaftoe: Agreed!
Lucas McCoy
2009-03-18 01:40:48
@BobbyShaftoe: Yeah, I know. I guess I hang out at slashdot too much... anytime someone mentions "die" and "open source" in the same syntax they blurt out what I said. But IMO this thing is too cool to die out.
Giovanni Galbo
2009-03-18 01:43:08
@Giovanni Galbo: I was hoping people wouldn't say that this would die out. I just wish it had, like a 50 member team to update and fix any problems.
Lucas McCoy
2009-03-18 01:49:07
@Lucas: To be fair, the first release (alpha I guess) was released in December, so the momentum probably isn't there yet.
Giovanni Galbo
2009-03-18 01:51:14
...also take a look at the changeset... there were checkins TODAY. They're actively working on it!
Giovanni Galbo
2009-03-18 01:52:14
@Giovanni Galbo: Thats nice to know, I'm gonna have to look at the changeset. Thanks!
Lucas McCoy
2009-03-18 02:03:29
Regarding embedded devices: when doing embedded programming, the _reason_ you normally use C is because you must also use the compiler provided by the device vendor. If the vendor won't even support C++, they're unlikely to add Vala.
Joel Coehoorn
2009-03-18 02:39:59
You don't need the vendor to add Vala support -- Vala preprocesses (err, "compiles") into C.
ephemient
2009-03-18 02:43:05
I like Vala because it means I can do something advanced on Linux without having to pay homage to Microsoft through Mono/C#, which seems sacrilegious, and which seems more logical to me than using Python. I do Python work only because I might have to, but prefer PHP or C. I'm not excellent at C, so Vala looks like the next best thing. So, I hope this Vala survives and grows.
Volomike
2010-07-05 02:56:41
+4
A:
It's looking quite good and this was one of my concerns before starting. I've started, two weeks in, I think things are looking quite healthy.
Vadi
2009-06-13 02:13:13
+5
A:
If you check the metrics for the Vala project you can see that it had a very strong growth pattern from the very start. Not only is it open source but there are more and more developers contributing to it over time, more and more people taking dependencies on it etc.
You can click the links "Very large, active development team" and "Established codebase" to see what these tags mean in terms in numbers compared to other open source projects.
martin
2009-10-03 10:51:27