I'm a C# developer who stumbled across a new programming language for linux called vala. It has almost exactly the same syntax as C#, which is awesome. I never really was a big fan of Mono. This allows programmers to write GTK+ apps in a C# style language. My question is: Does vala get compiled into C?
Yes, Vala is compiled directly to C. From the Vala homepage:
valac produces C source and header files from Vala source files as if you've written your library or application directly in C. Using a Vala library from a C application won't look different than using any other GObject-based library. There won't be a vala runtime library and applications can distribute the generated C code with their tarballs, so there are no additional run- or build-time dependencies for users.
You can read more about it here (and also get tutorials, mailing lists, et cetera). It's quite an interesting project.