[pacman-dev] Using libalpm with Vala

[Rémy Oudompheng]

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.