Ask HN: Should I learn Vala to develop cross-platform software?

Re:Ask HN: Should I learn Vala to develop cross-platform sof... by rprospero on Monday August 05, 2013 @11:30AM (#6160667)

Is there any particular reason that you've chosen to limit yourself to just Vala/GTK+ or C++/QT?

For my current job, I've had to write cross platform GUIs in Python/wxWidgets, Mathematica, Racket, Tcl/Tk, Haskell/GLUT, LabView, Clojure/Seesaw, and Perl/Tk. From a longevity perspective, Clojure is the only language that's not older than Vala by at least a decade.

None of those languages are a silver built and there's a couple I hope that I never have to touch again, but sometimes using the right tool can save you a bunch of heartache.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I learn Vala to develop cross-platform sof... by yapcguy on Monday August 05, 2013 @02:34PM (#6161901)

I build desktop apps for the Mac but want to build cross-platform software going forward. A native look'n'feel is a bonus, as well as easy deployment. I also don't want to be tied down to proprietary APIs like I am on the Mac with Cocoa, Core(Whatever), etc.

From a language perspective I prefer Objective-C, C#, Vala over C++. Personal taste. Sadly those languages don't have bindings to the toolkit which seems to have the most momentum, QT. There are third-party C# bindings to QT, Qyoto, but that requires using Mono which for some Linux users is a no no no.

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