Welcome to the Windows all-in-one distribution of the Vala programming language. This package contains everything one needs to create Vala-written console and GUI programs on Windows operating system.

With this distribution building the basic Vala program on Windows is as easy as

> valac hello.vala

Even building a full-fledged GTK+ program on Windows is equally a one-liner

> valac --pkg gtk+-3.0 -X -mwindows gtk.vala

The above sample Vala sources can be found in the <Vala for Windows>\share\example directory.

The distrubution comes in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors and bundles the Vala compiler itself, the MinGW GCC compiler toolchain and custom builds of the GLib and GTK+ stacks.

The latest distribution ships the following versions of software:

  • Vala — 0.36.4

  • Libgee — 0.20.0

  • GCC — 5.4.0

  • GLib — 2.52.3

  • GTK+2 — 2.24.31

  • GTK+3 — 3.22.16

The distribution download page is here.

Notes

The shipped Vala compiler and assotiated tools are patched to make automatic use of the bundled GCC toolchain and GLib/GTK+ libraries therefore it is not required to have them in PATH in order to build executables. This is made to prevent pollution of the PATH environment variable with GCC and GTK+ binaries which might interfere with other installations. The decision whether or not to augment the PATH is made at the distribution install time. A consequence of omitting the PATH augmentation is that the produced binaries will refuse to run due to missing DLLs. In this case the required libraries along with its dependencies are to be manually copied from the <Vala for Windows>\local\bin directory.

Happy coding and have fun!

Oleg A. Khlybov <fougas@mail.ru>