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Comment by sylware | Hacker News Reader

isn't that rust, but better?

> isn't that rust, but better?

Clearly no, because Vala has a bunch of issues with memory safety. Not because it's a bad language, but since it translates directly to GObject, there is a lot of problems around pointers, ownership, ... mainly because that language lacks maintainers and GTK/Gimp developers didn't like it because they are "C essentialists".

"C essentialist" is a line very hard to hold, because C via ISO is moved towards an horrible language like c++ (generic,__thread,etc). So, it is not C anymore, it is simple and lean C which should be the target of an essentialist line of conduct. Whatever, a good new language would first and above all be easier to write a compiler for than simple C.

__thread is essential for some applications, what's wrong with it?

To access TLS-ized system variables (for instance errno if I really need to, I would use the sysv ABI __tls_get_addr() function). But in the application domain, I would use pthread TLS.

That's much much slower though.

You would have to cache the system TLS address in the application pthread TLS.

No, pthread TLS is the slower one. Accessing system TLS can be done fast since lib knows the details of the implementation and, worst case, it can use inline assembly.

Also, pthread TLS adds a pointer dereference to each access.

The compiler does not know the inner layout of how the system TLS variables are stored (could be musl way, bionic way, glibc way, etc). It only knows that for system TLS variables it has to go thru __tls_get_addr(), stated by the sysv ABI. Indeed, you are not forced to use pthread TLS to cache the value, you can use your own thread allocated memory, or keep it around on the stack/regs. On x86_64, once you have resolved the address with __tls_get_addr() you can use the same address value for all threads, then use common to all thread storage.

I think we agree.

I read somewhere that some Gnome (and elementaryOS) people are looking for replacing Vala code with Rust. I can't find the exact place, but this is going on since 2016 at least https://blogs.gnome.org/despinosa/2016/11/01/rust-and-vala/

> Rust is on the horizon and have voices to use it instead Vala

And https://siliconislandblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/31/thoughts-...

Also mentioned here https://elementaryos.stackexchange.com/questions/10664/conce...

And it turns out that the Rust people eventually came up with nice ways of integrating GObject, starting from 2017

http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2017/05/02/gnom...

And nowadays, gtk4 https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/git/book/ and relm4 https://aaronerhardt.github.io/relm4-book/book/ are pretty cool

So I think that today Rust is a more satisfying language to code with, even in the ultra-specific niche of writing stuff with GObject

As someone who has helped create the new Vala website, this seem a bit weird for me to say but I believe that people should code in whatever they feel that they can be most productive with. If that language is Rust then go for it!

However, things can change over time of course.

If Vala would have the same number of people working on it, it would be a perfect language probably for the majority of use cases.

Faster compiler than rust, smaller binaries, easier syntax, good GUI as defacto library (GTK)

They are not nearly in the same niche, so the comparison doesn’t make sense.

By that logic Nim would be even better.

better stick to python, or lua or even javascript then, with the right bindings and engin.

It is C# for GNOME people

This. Honestly, I’ve always felt that Genie was the better GNOME successor to Boo; but Vala has long since become the “de facto” GNOME language.

We're still mostly C in GNOME, so hard to say de-facto by any means.

Not de facto as in universally (or even primarily) used. De facto as in "the language of GNOME", i.e. one built for and used by GNOME as a first class citizen.

C# for GNOME people was Mono, which was started and incubated in GNOME. Including MonoDevelop, which is now Visual Studio for Mac.

Mono is C#

Mono is much more than just C#. It was created by GNOME folks so they could use .NET to develop GNOME/linux software. In that way, Vala is similar to Mono: they were both created as replacements for using GObject-C to develop desktop Linux softeware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vala_(programming_language)#Hi...

Not quite so literally. But Vala itself is blatantly C#-like syntactically. And if you look at the original combination of C# (circa 2.0) + WinForms, they have the same symbiotic relationship as Vala and Gtk.

And a few people liked the language, but a lot of users complained about the memory bloat this introduced (this was back when people cared about RAM).

So Vala is trying to be the best of two worlds, having C-like resource usage with some of the language niceties of C#. Probably wouldn't have happened if Mono didn't prepare the way for C# syntax in the GNOME bubble.

It's almost more like c-flavored visual basic for gnome (based around gobject rather than COM).

c# is more of it's own thing whereas visual basic sort of had the same underlying idea of "hey we have this object library that has its own memory allocation primitives and data structures; what if we exposed it as its own language rather than making everyone use it from c/c++"

It's Gnome's Swift.

Hehe or alternative Gnome’s Objective-C. They should have build Gnome from the start to have an object model compatible with Objective-C.

I think you're thinking of https://vlang.io/

no, that's pascal but better

I've never tried it & have no opinion, but they're often compared, have similar goals, and it's name is mistakable for Vala, so I believe this is what they were asking about.

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