Vala (programming language)

Vala

Paradigm	Multi-paradigm: imperative, structured, object-oriented
Developer	Jürg Billeter, Raffaele Sandrini, Rico Tzschichholz
First appeared	2006; 18 years ago (2006)
Stable release	0.57.0  / 11 April 2023; 19 months ago (11 April 2023)
Typing discipline	Static, strong, inferred, structural
OS	Cross-platform all supported by GLib, but distributed as source code only.
License	LGPLv2.1+
Filename extensions	.vala, .vapi
Website	vala.dev
Influenced by
C, C++, C#, D, Java, Boo

Vala is an object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system.

Vala is syntactically similar to C# and includes notable features such as anonymous functions, signals, properties, generics, assisted memory management, exception handling, type inference, and foreach statements.^[1] Its developers, Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini, wanted to bring these features to the plain C runtime with little overhead and no special runtime support by targeting the GObject object system. Rather than compiling directly to machine code or assembly language, it compiles to a lower-level intermediate language. It source-to-source compiles to C, which is then compiled with a C compiler for a given platform, such as GCC or Clang.^[2]

Using functionality from native code libraries requires writing vapi files, defining the library interfaces. Writing these interface definitions is well-documented for C libraries. Bindings are already available for a large number of libraries, including libraries that are not based on GObject such as the multimedia library SDL and OpenGL.