Plaidophile

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A while ago I learned about an interesting language called Vala, which is basically C++ if it were redesigned from the ground up with only the good parts of C++, plus useful parts of other more-modern languages like C# and JavaScript. Every now and then I look at the tutorial again and it's just getting better and better. And it is designed to maintain ABI compatibility with C, and actually is just a front-end that generates and compiles C code, meaning it's also perfectly-suited for embedded programming, especially on platforms where C++ has been stupidly hobbled (such as Android NDK).

I especially like the way it handles generics, the way all Vala references are equivalent to boost::shared_ptr (with a keyword to make a reference weak - without any need to explicitly lock it), the way that you can still do explicit memory management if you need to (only with a very nicely-implemented equivalent of std::auto_ptr to make even that stuff easier), it supports contract-based programming features (including requiring explicit nullability for object parameters), and that it supports true closures (unlike Java's quasi-closures) with a syntax that isn't ridiculously horrible (unlike in Javascript, C99, or C++0xB2011). It also has a very nice syntax for function pointers delegates, and also has some syntactic features that are there specifically to support asynchronous message handling.

It's a shame that people only seem to think that it's suitable for Gnome, probably because it grew out of GObject and is part of the Gnome project. It's not! It's a general-purpose language, that just happens to also provide GTK and Gnome bindings as part of its standard library. But it's also compiled, C-compatible (and therefore C++-compatible), and doesn't require a ridiculously large and fragile runtime library.

Maybe someday I'll have an opportunity to actually do a project with it. For now I just feel like I keep on staring through the window at the shiny toy that I wish I could use.