suggestions sought for a framework for a quick, dirty, reallysimple GUI prototype

[Nadav Har'El]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012, ik wrote about "Re: suggestions sought for a framework for a quick, dirty, reallysimple GUI prototype":
> *"Vala* is an object-oriented
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented> programming
> language <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language> with a
> self-hosting <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting>
> compiler<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler>that generates
> C <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_%28programming_language%29> code and uses
> the GObject <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GObject> system.  "
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vala_%28programming_language%29

I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vala_%28programming_language%29
and see that Vala isn't a simple for scripting GTK (which I assumed from
the original description), but something completely different: It is a
new *compiled* language with a syntax resembling C#.

The fact that Vala is compiled into C and only from there to machine
code, is immaterial. I still remember the first C++ compiler I used,
in 1988, compiled C++ code to C (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront).
In that era, compiling into C was actually a fashion. Lex and Yacc
also compile into C, and so and so did quite a lot of other languages.
Why has this changed? Mainly, gcc is to "blame". Gcc is open-source and
more "front ends" can be written to it, so compilers for Fortran, Ada,
Java, Go, and probably other languages were written as Gcc frontends.
If Gcc didn't exist, or was closed-source, my guess is that all these
compiler-writers would have compiled into *C*, and let GCC the C
compiler handle the task of converting this C into machine code on a
hundred different architectures.

> If what you understood is true, and he is looking for a C++ solutions, why
> do you keep offering Python or Vala to him ?

Because it makes for an interesting discussion :-)
I'm sure Oleg is capable of picking what he needs from this discussion.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Thursday, Jul 19 2012, 1 Av 5772
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |In Fortran, God is real unless declared
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |an integer.