This is not really a post about Vala--though I do think Vala deserves a closer look. It is about the general philosophy of evaluating programming languages. I also wrote a post that's not really about Perl.

There are so many programming languages out there that it's difficult to determine which are worth my attention. I've recently started looking for a new language to learn in an effort to continue expanding my tool set. I have an ever growing list of programming languages I would like to learn someday. One language that was not on that list was Vala.

I had dismissed Vala as a GNOME thing with little interest to those outside the GNOME community, but recently I had seen Vala pop up in a few unexpected places, so I decided to give it a closer look.

One of the ways I evaluate a programming language is to see what cool projects are being built with it. The way I do this is by going to GitHub's trending page and selecting the language from the Languages drop-down on the right.

If all I find is the language interpreter/compiler, a web application framework, and a few assorted libraries, I'm not usually going to spend much time on that language. I'm interested in languages that people are using to build cool things. Every language (no matter how obscure) seems to have at least one web application framework these days. The trending page for Crystal this month shows no fewer than four web frameworks: Amber, Amethyst, Kemal, and Lucky. Forth has 1991. Nim has Jester. Smalltalk has Seaside.

Nor do I really care that much about module counts. Your language may have four different libraries to parse JSON and multiple ORMs, but what I want to know is what are people building with those libraries. If people are building cool projects with a language, I think a strong ecosystem and useful libraries will follow.

I realize GitHub might not host all the cool things being done in a language, but I feel it is representative. Maybe cool things are being done in a language but they are proprietary. If a language is fun to use, I think it will be used for both proprietary and open source projects, so I think open source projects sufficient to judge a language. There could also be cool projects on SourceForge, GitLab, etc. For now, GitHub has by far the largest collection of open source projects, so it serves to give a pretty good survey of what is available in a given language.

The Part about Vala

I guess since I do have Vala in the title, I should share some of the cool projects being built with Vala that convinced me to give it a closer look.

Akira. This is a UI/UX design tool for creating UI mock-ups. It hasn't even had a stable release yet, and it already has 1,526 stars on GitHub and $560/month pledged on Patreon. It has a really cool mascot too. The lead developer also has a SQL client and FTP client written in Vala.

Birdfont. Font editor. Many Linux distro's have packages in their repos, and there is a package in OpenBSD. There are also binaries for Windows and Mac. This project is evidence that Vala is not limited to GNOME. I also found it funny that GitHub thinks 11.3% of the source is written in Brainfuck because of the .bf extension used for fonts in the Birdfont format.

Peek. GIF screen recorder. Packaged for a lot of distros. Could be useful for creating animated screenshots for READMEs.

pdfpc. Presenter console with multi-monitor support for PDF files. Vala must be easy to learn or there are a lot of developers who already know it, because some of these projects are able to draw a lot of contributors. This project has 43 contributors with the latest commit 19 days ago.

Timeshift. System restore tool for Linux. This is another Vala project with a small but active community. It has 30 contributors and users submitting issues and pull requests.

Final Term. This was a terminal emulator with advanced features. It's no longer maintained, but it was very popular (it has 3,999 stars on GitHub).

Most of the default apps in elementary OS are written in Vala. I haven't used it (I won't give up my MATE desktop), but elementary OS is a popular Linux distro (currently #4 on DistroWatch). It's app store, audio player, calculator, calendar, email client, file manager, image viewer, panel, screenshot tool, terminal emulator, text editor, video player, and even it's window manager are all written in Vala. I question the necessity of needing to write so many of their own apps when there are already so many great options available for many of these, but they do have a consistent design aesthetic and ecosystem. Many third party apps written for elementary OS (but working with other distros) are also written in Vala (such as this eBook reader and focused writing app).

Deepin is a popular Linux distro in China with it's own desktop environment. Unlike elementary OS which uses GTK, it uses Qt, yet it still employs Vala for a couple things. It's terminal emulator and it's window manager (which started out as a fork of the elementary OS window manager) are both written in Vala.

There are some official GNOME apps written in Vala, but surprisingly, since Vala is a GNOME project, not very many. The GNOME disk usage analyzer, backup tool, and photo manager are written in Vala.

There's even a web application framework written in Vala.

Vala may not have developers who "rewrite all the things" like Rust or the backing of a tech giant like Go and Reason. I've been averaging a new programming language every seven years, so this is a big decision. I'm taking my time. I'm considering making Rust or D my next language, but now I'm also considering Vala.