Abstract
This chapter explains why Vala is a good idea and how you could benefit from a massively increased productivity, if you use it. It talks a bit about the history of Vala and mentions the author’s personal involvement. Structure, audience, and typographic conventions are presented.
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Notes
- 1.
Moore’s law of doubling the transistor density in integrated circuits approximately every two years has been valid for five decades. By now, physical boundaries make it almost impossible for it to continue, which is why the development has shifted toward massive parallelization instead of ever-growing clock rates.
- 2.
Many compilers are using a similar scheme, e.g., gcc and clang are separated into a frontend and a backend. The frontend is generating architecture independent code; the platform-specific backend creates the resulting machine code.
- 3.
Although just-in-time compilation (JIT) techniques can help here, the general statement still holds.
- 4.
In March 2018, the so-called “POSIX profile”—a way to create Vala programs that do not depend on glib—has been reintroduced to Vala.
- 5.
This may sound slightly familiar to the older ones among us: The first compiler for the C++ programming language was called cfront and generated ANSI-C as well. Objective-C did start its career as a frontend for C as well.
- 6.
And also a C-ABI (Application Binary Interface), which may be even more important for some use cases.
- 7.
The major reasons for that likely being Mono’s reliance on a VM and its nonexistent interoperability with arbitrary C-libraries.
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© 2019 Michael Lauer
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Lauer, M. (2019). Introduction. In: Introducing Vala Programming. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5380-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5380-9_1
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Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4842-5379-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-4842-5380-9
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