Thoughts on Gnome glib, gobject, vala etc? I tend to use glib for my (academic) code for pretending C is a high-level language. It also seems to make up for im

Thoughts on Gnome glib, gobject, vala etc? I tend to use glib for my (academic) code for pretending C is a high-level language. It also seems to make up for implementation-dependent functions in C and many portability issues. Also, IMO, vala > C++. My question is, really, are there any other tools for high-level C programming and do you know of any disadvantages of the Gnome stack?