Overview of Writing a Library with Vala

This is an outline of a tutorial for writing libraries with Vala. The suite of pages provide useful links and basic explanations.

A library is like any other program, but with the added dimension of a programming interface for client applications. The tutorial focuses on designing and implementing an easy to use and robust programming interface to your library.

The tutorial breaks the process into three stages:

1. "Naming and Building" - this gets you started, you will end up with the library binary and files for client bindings
2. "ABI and API Design" - this is the hard part and the main focus of development work, to provide a good interface for client bindings
3. "Bindings" - this covers the many languages that can use the interface and so provide test code of the interface