Vala is a programming language mainly targeted at GNOME developers.
Its syntax is inspired by C# (and thus, indirectly, by Java). But unlike C# and Java, Vala does not attempt to provide memory safety: Vala is compiled to C, and the C code is compiled with GCC using typical compiler flags. Basic operations like integer arithmetic are directly mapped to C constructs. As a results, the recommendations in [chap-Defensive_Coding-C] apply.
In particular, the following Vala language constructs can result in undefined behavior at run time:
Integer arithmetic, as described in [sect-Defensive_Coding-C-Arithmetic].
Pointer arithmetic, string subscripting and the
substring method on strings (the
string class in the
glib-2.0 package) are not range-checked. It
is the responsibility of the calling code to ensure that the
arguments being passed are valid. This applies even to cases
(like substring) where the implementation
would have range information to check the validity of indexes.
See [sect-Defensive_Coding-C-Pointers].
Similarly, Vala only performs garbage collection (through
reference counting) for GObject values. For
plain C pointers (such as strings), the programmer has to ensure
that storage is deallocated once it is no longer needed (to
avoid memory leaks), and that storage is not being deallocated
while it is still being used (see [sect-Defensive_Coding-C-Use-After-Free]).
