Editor fork in Vala?

Editor
1

Why Vala? GTK2 will be deprecated soon, and wxGTK will need some time to be updated to GTK3. Editor is not mature, only the UI is made.

Vala is a language similar to C#. It’s compiled into C, so it’s damn fast. It uses Glib (GObject) to do this magic. And, of course, it’s portable.

Is fast to develop, and you can debug it with GDB debugger because it generates C code, GDB can work with Vala breakpoints without problems.

Some screencasts:

Vala kickstart example with GTK+:
people.gnome.org/~aruiz/videos/g … t-vala.ogg

Debugging:
taschenorakel.de/files/vala-debug.ogg

Parasite, “firebug for GTK+”:
chipx86.github.com/gtkparasite/v … -intro.avi

And of course, you can use Glade .ui files with Vala.

More info:
live.gnome.org/Vala

2

The Qt framework is not an option?.
I do not know the c++ programming languange, but i have use a litle of PyQt and the Qt framework have nice features and work on almost everithing.

3

I’m cheking Vala’s tutorial, sounds fine since with this we sould work directly with strings and not convert wxStrings over and over, besides it has a lot of functionability:

bool b = bool.parse(“false”); // => false
int i = int.parse("-52"); // => -52
double d = double.parse(“6.67428E-11”); // => 6.67428E-11
string s1 = true.to_string(); // => "true"
string s2 = 21.to_string(); // => “21”

or even truncate an string:

string greeting = “hello, world”;
string s1 = greeting[7:12]; // => "world"
string s2 = greeting[-4:-2]; // => “or”

even you can search text fragments:

if (“ere” in “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”) …

this would be usefull for the tipical command lines [c=4]text[/c] just using
if ("[c=" in commandstring) …

Still we cant modify strings content by index, we have to create a new string instead.

I’ll keep watching tomorrow, but i’m still not sure about some things:

How do you compile programs for other platforms diferent from Linux? (since Vala is pointed to an easy way to create GNOME applications)
Do you have to compile c and h files and then use a C ocmpiler for windows?

4

Vala uses GObject from GLib. Vala is unicode friendly. You can use utf8 characters in source code strings and comments.

live.gnome.org/Vala/StringSample

5

I’m having some trouble and i’d like to speak with you in IRC, since rewrite the entire editor in vala should be a great work and need to stablish some stuff

some of the questions i’m asking myself are:
vala work with GTK+, we will use Gtk API on windows as well?
vala is designed for usage in gnome, but lastest ubuntu release the desktop embiroment changed and no longer uses gnome.
wxWidget was about to drop support to GTK3, does vala have support for it one?
where can i found Gtk documentation for vala?
what API should we use for graphics rendering (SDL, pixman, OpenGL)?
i wil need help to create readers and others libraryes “vapi” files to use them in vala (vapi are like headers to use compiled objects in vala codes, for example gtk.vapi has the reference to gtk methods)

6

GTK3 is preferred, but we still can use GTK2 for Windows while the GTK3 Windows port is not mature yet.
The canvas for rendering is Cairo.
Ubuntu will include GTK3 in 11.10.
wxWidgets will support GTK3 (and included in distros) a lot of time later.
Vala documentation for GTK (specially GTK3 specific) is still small, but there are some examples: live.gnome.org/Vala/GTKSample
We can play with editor first without thinking in project import now, maybe an external conversion tool is better.

7

just to display an advance to the people who is not usually in the IRC.