Girò

Girò is a red Italian wine grape variety that is grown on Sardinia and used mostly in the production of fortified wines in the Giro di Cagliari Denominazione di origine controllata (DOC). The grape was once widely planted throughout Sardinia but its plantings were decimated when the phylloxera epidemic hit the island at the end of the nineteenth century. At the turn of the 21st century there were 552 hectares (1,364 acres) of the grape planted throughout Italy, mostly in the Sardinian provinces of Cagliari and Oristano.

Origins

Wine historians and ampelographers have speculated that the grape has Spanish origins and may have been introduced to the island when it was ruled by the Crown of Aragon. One theory suggest that the grape was brought to Sardinian around the same time that Mazuelo, Graciano and Pascale were introduced.

Relationship to other grapes

In ampelographical text, Girò is often listed as the same variety as Albaranzeuli nero. However while recent DNA profiling has determined that Girò is likely a parent of the Sardinian wine grape Albaranzeuli bianco, the exact relationship between Albaranzeuli Nero and Girò is not yet clear.

Ægir

In Norse mythology, Ægir (Old Norse "sea") is a sea jötunn associated with the ocean. He is also known for hosting elaborate parties for the gods.

Ægir's servants are Fimafeng (killed by Loki) and Eldir.

Description

The Nafnaþulur attached to the Prose Edda list Ægir as a giant.Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon saw his name as pre-Norse, derived from an ancient Indo-European root.

Attestations

Both Fundinn Noregr and Snorri Sturluson in Skáldskaparmál state that Ægir is the same as the sea-giant Hlér, who lives on the isle of Hlésey, and this is borne out by kennings. Snorri uses his visiting the Æsir as the frame of that section of the Prose Edda.

In Lokasenna, Ægir hosts a party for the gods where he provides the ale brewed in an enormous pot or cauldron provided by Thor and Týr. The story of their obtaining the pot from the giant Hymir is told in Hymiskviða.

The prose introduction to Lokasenna and Snorri's list of kennings state that Ægir is also known as Gymir, who is Gerðr's father, but this is evidently an erroneous interpretation of kennings in which different giant-names are used interchangeably.

Vala (programming language)

Vala is an object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system (that "can be seen as an alternative to C-derived languages such as C++ and Objective-C").

Vala is syntactically similar to C# and includes several features such as: anonymous functions, signals, properties, generics, assisted memory management, exception handling, type inference, and foreach statements. Its developers Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini aim to bring these features to the plain C runtime with little overhead and no special runtime support by targeting the GObject object system. Rather than compiling directly to machine code or assembly language, it compiles to a higher level intermediate language. It source-to-source compiles to C, which is then compiled with a C compiler for a given platform, such as GCC.

For memory management, the GObject system provides reference counting. In C, a programmer must manually manage adding and removing references, but in Vala, managing such reference counts is automated if a programmer uses the language's built-in reference types rather than plain pointers.