[Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Toolkit in Vala

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 5:16 PM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 12:09 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> While packagin GCompris-9 for sugar, it was decided to have sugar
>>>> native toolbas for GCompris in sugar environment.
>>>>
>>>> So, instead of coding them in plain C, new project was initiated to port
>>>> sugar-toolkit to Vala[1]
>>>> http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/toolkit
>>>> At some point we can completely switch from python sugar-toolkit to
>>>> Vala based project.
>>>
>>> Wow!!
>>>
>>> I think even for Python based activities, having the Sugar toolkit
>>> written in C will decrease activity startup time.
>>>
>>> And for non-Python activities, it will finally be possible to use
>>> native Sugar widgets such as the toolbar.
>>>
>>> I presume the plan is to use 0install to download the Vala toolkit?
>>
>> Not sure how that would work. Vala generates C code which then needs
>> to be compiled. It doesn't provide any advantage to your average end
>> user its just another way to develop C code.
>
> Ah, I was assuming that the generated C code would then be compiled
> into a shared library that could be exported to Python and other
> languages, thus providing first class support to languages like Mono
> and Ruby and also providing faster-loading Python bindings than what
> we have now.

No, it just generates the C code which is then compiled by gcc. See
http://live.gnome.org/Vala for further details.

Peter