"About half a year ago I was looking around me and seeing stagnation in the GNOME community. I was concerned that GNOME had lost its momentum and that we were just making boring incremental releases that added very little new functionality. I think I was very wrong. I'd like to take this time to list some things that are happening right now in the GNOME community that have me very excited. These are the projects that are actively improving the future of the GNOME desktop." Let's hope a punctuation checker will be part of GNOME too. One Aaron is enough.
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Member since:2007-07-20
GCC and mono are different beasts. GCC compiles native code where as mono/java dont - Vala will be compiled C code with no odd runtime dependencies like java and mono.
Vala seems roughly comparable shedskin* or GCC's java compiler - GCJ, which compiles binaries but youll find its not used by many projects compared to sun's java.
* shedskin is python -> C++
http://sourceforge.net/projects/shedskin/
Member since:2005-10-13
I know exactly what the differences are between GCC and mono. And mono does execute native code at the end, the VM has a backend that spits out native code to run on your machine, just like the Java vm does. The difference is that it is compiled at run time rather than ahead of time, which means that any optimizations made have to be done more quickly, but also allows for some new optimizations not available on statically compiled code. That's also why it is compiled down to a psuedo-assembly language rather than plain C code, because the final compilation step is much faster.
Edited 2007-08-08 00:04
Member since:2006-02-06
Member since:
2005-10-13
And then you get the low overhead, fast execution speed of pure C compiled code.
Vala translates to C code because it is an order of magnitude easier than going straight to assembly, just like Java and .NET go to their virtual assembly language that abstracts away the underlying hardware. It won't be faster, though. If anything, the higher level of abstraction will slow things down more since the compiler will have less information when it is being compiled into assembly. (Of course, that assumes that GCC and mono have the same amount of optimizations in them, which is probably false, and you won't have the startup penalty of a VM)
Still, sometimes perceptions are more important than actual performance, and people usually associate C code with speed.
Edited 2007-08-07 22:43