2.1. Basic Types

In Vala, the sizes of standard types (int, long, etc.) are architecture-dependent. To get the size of a type in bytes, you can use the sizeof operator. For example:

int size = sizeof (int);

Vala provides additional types with architecture-independent guaranteed sizes:

• Signed: int8, int16, int32, int64
• Unsigned: uint8, uint16, uint32, uint64

Note that there is no byte type in Vala. Instead, you can use uint8 or int8.

Vala uses bool instead of boolean for boolean values.

Vala also has an additional basic type called unichar, which represents a Unicode character.

Constant Modifier

In Vala, the const keyword is used to declare constants, similar to final in Java.

Methods on Basic Types

Vala's basic types have methods that can be called directly on the values. For example:

int a = (-4).abs ();
string s = a.to_string ();
int b = int.max (5, 7);      // static method call on 'int'

In the above code:

• (-4).abs () calls the abs method on the integer value -4, returning its absolute value.
• a.to_string () converts the integer a to a string representation.
• int.max (5, 7) calls the static max method on the int type, returning the maximum value between 5 and 7.

These are just a few examples of the methods available on Vala's basic types.