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.