Personal programs to learn Vala and exercises using Introducing Vala Programming (in separate branch). Vala is used as the primary language for Elementary OS, which is a newer Linux distro. The OS itself and all its applications are built with the Vala language. Vala is more or less a tranformation language to ease the burdon of C level code. The valac compiler works by translating the Vala syntax into C and then uses a C compiler to finish packaging the binary (typically uses GCC). With the valac compiler actually comes 2 different syntax languages, Vala and Genie. Vala is more similar to C# while Genie is very similar to Python. There are no differences in functionality between the 2 dialects except for syntactically they are different. There are rumors that Genie also is missing features that Vala does support, have yet to come across this.
Chapters from Introducing Vala Programming.pdf
- Depending on your OS, installation will vary, check https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala for more information for your OS.
- After installing vala verify you have the valac compiler with the following command:
- valac --version
- If you plan to use gtk+3 you will need to use a package manager like Homebrew. (brew install gtk+3)
- To compile a program with the gtk+3 package you will run the following command:
- valac --pkg gtk+-3.0 main.vala
- ValaC
- (Optional but is necessary for any GNOME GUIs)