Vala (programming language)

Vala is an object-oriented programming language developed initially by Jurg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini beginning in 2006, designed to bring modern, C#-like language conveniences, including classes, interfaces, generics, closures and properties, to developers working with the GObject object system used by the GNOME desktop environment and the GTK graphical toolkit, without the runtime overhead of a virtual machine. Vala source code compiles to plain C using the GObject system, meaning Vala programs run with performance comparable to hand-written C while offering a substantially higher-level syntax.