Getting Vala on macOS

Should you develop applications on macOS using Vala? Probably not. Cross-platform applications I can run on my desktop and laptop sound cool though.

Mac Homebrew & Vala

For this guide, I’m using Homebrew. Other options include MacPorts or jhbuild.

To install Homebrew, use:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"  
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

To install Vala and GTK4, run:

brew install vala gtk4 libadwaita adwaita-icon-theme vala-language-server meson ninja  

GTK4 is for developing GUI applications. libadwaita provides modern UI experiences. adwaita-icon-theme gives us a default iconset to use. meson and ninja will act as the build system. vala-language-server is not required, but when we setup code, it’ll provide intellisense.

Setting Up Code

You can use your favorite text editor, but I like using Visual Studio Code. To have the best Vala developer experience, I recommend installing the Vala extension.

Creating Our Project

It’s possible to compile a project using valac, but we’re going to setup a project structure we can build on.

src/Application.vala  
meson.build  
README.md  

Later on, we can add vapi, tests, data, and more…

For now, we just want to validate Vala’s installation.

src/Application.vala

public class Kamusta  
{  
    public static int main (string[] argv)  
    {  
        var app = new Gtk.Application ("in.twirp.vala.kamusta",  
                                       ApplicationFlags.FLAGS_NONE);  

        app.activate.connect (() =>  
        {  
            // Create a new Window  
            var window = new Gtk.ApplicationWindow (app);  

            // Create a new button  
            var button = new Gtk.Button.with_label ("Kamusta Vala!");  

            // Close Window on button click  
            button.clicked.connect (() =>  
            {  
                window.close ();  
            });  

            window.set_title ("Hello Vala!");  
            window.set_child (button);  
            window.present ();  
        });  

        return app.run (argv);  
    }  
}  
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

meson.build

# Project Declaration  
project(  
    'in.twirp.vala.kamusta', # Project ID  
    ['vala', 'c'], # Compilers  
    version: '0.0.1' # Version  
)  

lib_dependencies = [  
    dependency('gtk4'),  
    dependency('libadwaita-1')  
]  

executable(  
    'kamusta-vala', # Binary Name  
    # Source Files  
    'src/Application.vala',  
    dependencies: lib_dependencies,  
    install: false  
)  
Code language: PHP (php)

README.md

# Kamusta Vala  

Sample `Hello World` project.  
Code language: PHP (php)

Building & Running

From the root of our project, we can run:

meson build  
cd build  
ninja  

To run our project

./kamusta-vala  

and…

So cool!

Code can be found on GitHub.

Next time, we’ll start going over integrating with macOS.