Question: I'm new to Vala. I'm not familiar with GObject. As I understand it, GObject was spun off from the GLib project from GNOME. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I do like the syntax and implementation of Vala very much, yet it is not in my intentions to write desktop applications for GNOME.

I also know (think I know) that Vala does not have a standard library other than GObject itself.

So my question is: Can Vala be used without GObject and if it can, is it usable (are there optimal and maintained base libraries for common things like type conversions, math, string manipulation, buffers, etc... available)?

Answer: 
There is some other Vala profiles like [Dova](http://live.gnome.org/Dova) and Posix.
Here is another profile that you can use [Aroop](https://github.com/kamanashisroy/aroop). (Note it is still under heavy development). What I hope is it is good if you need high performance. Please check the [features here](https://github.com/kamanashisroy/aroop/blob/master/talks/features.md).