[Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Toolkit in Vala

[Aleksey Lim]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 12:22:25PM -0500, Wade Brainerd wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Oh; I get that.  I was just wondering what Aleksey planned to do with
> the C code once generated.  It sounds like he's just added it directly
> the GCompris makefiles.

not exactly, http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/toolkit is just regular
autotools C based project, which has additional generation stage
(.vala -> .c/.h), the output library will be just regular .so accessible
in GCompris via pkg-config.

> 
> Best,
> Wade
> 

-- 
Aleksey