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Emmanuele Bassi
bassi.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2016
Emmanuele Bassi, a GNOME and GTK developer, writes about GTK internals, GPU rendering, the Vala language, and GNOME history.
What HN saysHN links his 2017 post on Vala, which commenters cite as evidence GNOME developers moved away from it, and his GSK posts for GTK drawing.
24HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
24stories submitted
194story points
1 year agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The Vala Language (2017)6 people · 94 points · first shared 2017 · 54 comments on HN
- 2Dev vs. Ops5 people · 73 points · first shared 2017 · 12 comments on HN
- 3GTK Scene Kit: Offloading UI Toolkit Rendering to the GPU3 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 4The Mirror2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 5[Podcast] History of Gnome: The 'Friendly' Desktop Wars Begin2 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 6Who wrote GTK+ 3.201 people · 5 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 7The History of Gnome1 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 8Constraints Editing (GTK+)1 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 9Governance in Gnome1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 10History of Gnome1 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 11History of Gnome / Episode 1.c: Applications1 people · 1 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 12Constraints1 people · 1 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 13Amberol – Rust and GTK4 music player1 people · 1 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 14GLib tools rewrite1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
ndiddy · 2024-04-08
Has Vala seen much activity recently? The last time I remember hearing about it was reading a blog post from one of the main GNOME developers (https://www.bassi.io/articles/2017/02/13/on-vala/) saying that Vala was basically being maintained by a single developer and he didn't recommend using it for new development.
war1025 · 2020-01-21
It's used but some of the core gnome developers have advocated for people to stop using it.
What I can find with a quick search this morning: [1] [2]
Then again, there are also several people who still say it's worth using: [3] [4]
So maybe it's just Emmanuele Bassi advocating against it. If you look at the development pace, though, it hasn't really seen any significant development for quite a long time.
[1] https://twitter.com/ebassi/status/827482509982195712
[2] https://www.bassi.io/articles/2017/02/13/on-vala/
[3] https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2017/02/19/on-problems-with-vala/
[4] https://blogs.gnome.org/despinosa/2017/02/14/vala-is-not-a-programming…
jgillich · 2017-04-05
Actually, quite the opposite, the GNOME folks have been moving away from it: https://www.bassi.io/articles/2017/02/13/on-vala/
I think the only Vala maintainer right now is from Elementary OS, where they use primarily Vala.
bwindels · 2016-09-19
For Gtk+ this might be a good place to start:
https://blog.gtk.org/2016/06/15/drawing-in-gtk/
The API will likely change considerably in Gtk4, more here:
https://www.bassi.io/articles/2016/07/05/gsk-demystified-1/