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vala 0.8

Vala 0.8 has been released on March 31th. Apart from the usual added bindings there are the following really awesome features:

chained relational expressions

void main(string[] argv) {
	var number = argv[1].to_int();
	message("number: %d", number);

	if(1 < number < 10)
		message("number is between 1 and 10");
}

regular expression literals

void main(string[] argv) {
	string msg = argv[1];
	message("msg: %s", msg);

	if(/foo.*bar/.match(msg))
		message("string matches foo.*bar");
}

Support of in for arrays

void main(string[] argv) {
	if("--help" in argv)
		message("You can't be helped!");
}

dova profile

This is kind of secret (note: it has not been announced with the release). You can use the dova profile instead of the glib profile. The leightweight glib alternative can be enabled with “–profile=dova”, but it’s still in heavy development and lots of stuff won’t work. You can find out more about dova on You can find out more about dova on gitorious.

Update (2015-12-27)

Project is most likely dead some information about it can still be found on Gnome.