Description:

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern
programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any
additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI
compared to applications and libraries written in C.

valac, the Vala compiler, is a self-hosting compiler that translates
Vala source code into C source and header files. It uses the GObject
type system to create classes and interfaces declared in the Vala
source code. It's also planned to generate GIDL files when
gobject-introspection is ready.

The syntax of Vala is similar to C#, modified to better fit the GObject
type system. Vala supports modern language features as the following:

* Interfaces
* Properties
* Signals
* Foreach
* Lambda expressions
* Type inference for local variables
* Non-null types [PARTIAL]
* Exception handling [PLANNED]
* Assisted memory management

* type modules (aka. Plugins)

Vala is designed to allow access to existing C libraries, especially
GObject-based libraries, without the need for runtime bindings. Each
to be used library requires a Vala API file at compile-time,
containing the class and method declarations in Vala syntax. Vala
currently comes with experimental bindings for GLib and GTK+. It's
planned to provide generated bindings for the full GNOME Platform at a
later stage.

Using classes and methods written in Vala from an application written
in C is not difficult. The Vala library only has to install the
generated header files and C applications may then access the
GObject-based API of the Vala library as usual. It should also be
easily possible to write a bindings generator for access to Vala
libraries from applications written in e.g. C# as the Vala parser is written
as a library, so that all compile-time information is available when
generating a binding.