vala-examples/01-into

Introduction

Wikipedia says:

Vala is an object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system. Vala is syntactically similar to C# and includes notable features such as anonymous functions, signals, properties, generics, assisted memory management, exception handling, type inference, and foreach statements.

To install:

# Debian:
sudo apt install valac
# Void Linux:
sudo xbps-install valac
# Arch Linux:
sudo pacman -S vala

More distros here.

The shortest example of a vala program I could find is:

void main () {
	print ("Hello World\n");
}

A more complex version of this with object oriented features would be:

class Sample: Object {
	void greeting () {
		stdout.printf ("Hello World\n");
	}

	static void main (string[] args) {
		var sample = new Sample ();
		sample.greeting ();
	}
}

Save it on a test.vala file, then run valac test.vala. This will give you a test binary file. Execute it with ./test to see it running:

$ valac test.vala
$ ./test
Hello World