Notices

But... it's *Pascal* FFS.

Does it have garbage collection? Threading is something "to be improved in the next version", which is worrying.

D and Vala both look interesting, and up to the challenge. With Vala slightly ahead of D, IMHO.

The documentation for Vala took a sudden giant leap a short while ago, there's about 56MB of docu (mostly taken by the bindings documentation) on http://www.vala-project.org/doc/
I think it's a good choice for writing gtk/cairo/hildon programs. For general programming D looks quite nice.

It's object pascal, please
No, you have to take care of freeing objects yourself.
OTOH it has a native string type that you don't have to allocate/deallocate.

Oh, I wasn't aware of that, and I use threading all the time.

I don't really know them, but they both seem to be too much like C to be any good FFS
(maybe they're better, but I can usually recompile the whole lazarus ide in the time that gcc compiles "hello world", and seeing that vala translates to C which is then compiled to native code....maybe you enjoy watching paint dry )

Paint drying's often more entertaining than what's on TV at the moment!

I'll have a closer look at FreePascal, but've had quite a bit of fun with Delphi recently.

sad but true, but keep in mind that what you have over there (at least bbc4 had reruns of "the prisoner" and "the avengers") is way better than what we have over here (though "il commissario montalbano" is pretty good, but that's all).
At least with my dish I can choose the least of many evils

nm: ignore post

Hmm, and now I'll never know ;-)

To clarify, my comment about "fun with Delphi" should have additional sarcasm tags, or at least sarcastic quotes around 'fun'.

Yeah, we already got that

Just checking, I'd hate to be taken as a Delphi supporter ;-)