Vala
Vala is a very new language. It was designed to make the lives of the developers of GNOME easier by bringing features from modern languages into C for use in the GNOME desktop environment development. The syntax is very similar to C#. Vala is a compiled language, but instead of being complied directly to bytecode, Vala is compiled to C, which is then compiled with a C compiler for each specific platform.
In C, a programmer must manually manage reference in memory. In Vala, this is automated if the built-in reference types are used instead of plain pointers. Vala also uses the GNOME GObject system to provide reference counting. For the most part, usage of Vala is primarily by people working on GNOME, which makes sense because this is the ...
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