Vala is an interesting language - it looks like C#, but is a compiled, reference counted, GObject based language (which is Gnome's/GTK's object model library), that simplifies/streamlines writing app code, compared to writing it in C.<p>Which brings on an interesting historical tangent - back in the day, Windows applications were written against the COM object model, either in pure C, or C++ with MFC. The parallels are obvious - Microsoft needed a language that was easier to use and better suited for the needs for applications programmers.<p>The obvious thing would've been to build something like Vala - a COM based reference counted compiled language - but they decided to build .NET/C# a garbage-collected JITted language with an entirely alien library and execution model. And while it became somewhat a success in the world of generic software dev, it never fulfilled this niche, with none of the core MS products ever integrating it, and most of the internal teams treating it with animosity.<p>I wonder why Microsoft decided to go down this route.