Hello, I became recently interested in Vala, and I did several experiments to try interfacing it with libalpm. Vala is an object-oriented language created to be used mainly with glib2/gtk, and writing Vala bindings is especially lightweight : it is only a matter of writing a "dictionary" between C functions and methods. I think it might be a nice alternative to C when writing small command line or GTK utilities. I have put an example of how the C version of pactree would be written in Vala, at http://github.com/remyoudompheng/libalpm-vala Memory management is especially tricky, as I am new to Vala, and not very familiar with the internals of libalpm. So for the moment, only a very small set of functions are wrapped and this version of pactree does not segfault. Feel free to make any comments. Regards, Rémy.