Overview

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.

Getting started

The classic "Hello, world" example in Vala:

using GLib;

public class Sample : Object { public Sample () { }

public void run () { stdout.printf ("Hello, world!\n"); }

static int main (string[] args) { var sample = new Sample (); sample.run (); return 0; } }

Store the code in a file whose name ends in ".vala", such as `hello.vala`, and compile it with the command:

valac -o hello hello.vala

This will produce an executable file called `hello`.