[hybrids]

I don't really get what point you're trying to make here. Yes, people should not be mean-spirited, but the opposite (i.e. the internet should be a hugbox) is just contrarian; and, for the record, I don't think the article is very mean-spirited at all when you take in consideration what percisely it was responding to.

A lot of the criticism of V takes aim at how the language was advertised which strikes a lot of people as rightfully annoying in the "C++ killer" space, something that a lot of people have put a lot of hard work already into which should not be entirely out of hand (this space is becoming very crowded for attention). If V's code remained the same at launch with its author choosing to be a little more conservative and thoughtful with its announcement, this type of response would not have happened. Its author did not make the status of the language entirely clear. When Odin came out a year ago, Lobster half a year ago, Zig three years ago, or Mun a month ago (of whom its authors were considerably modest: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173822), sure, they were critiqued, but they were not met with the specific kind of response V had for a reason.

Keep in mind languages (that don't aim to be toys) should rightfully be subject to a greater degree of criticism as their goals are primarily to upend a domain in such a way that if they fail, it renders the efforts of a lot of other people writing code in that language as something for naught. People take gambles when they adopt new technologies in general, but languages (maybe operating systems by extension) are of a significantly different scope.

[amedvednikov]

So what's the actual criticism? So far it's only been things like "it has a freetype dependecy", "it has no AST, so json decoding is not possible", "it's a joke language, no way V is written in V" etc.

[hybrids]

Claims to "being able to now compile itself in 0.09 seconds" whilst pushing the need for an AST to the side represents a serious problem in the language's general direction (and I mean general in an aggregated way). Of course shelling-out to curl for your download function is a bodge to be fixed, but the language's issues are not merely one specific problem. The author's misrepresentation of the language, of course, hangs overhead upon all of this.

https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/35

I don't want to discount all of the work people have put into V. It is clear that they have made considerable progress since earlier this year and I commend them for pushing the language into a more usable state. Nevertheless, I still retain a considerable degree of skepticism.

[amedvednikov]

And you link to the very same thread by another language author that claimed there's no way V could be built in V and JSON decoding is impossible without an AST.

> Claims to "being able to now compile itself in 0.09 seconds" whilst pushing the need for an AST to the side represents a serious problem in the language's general direction

Critique for focusing on fast compilation times? :)

Any valid criticism?

[hybrids]

Are you advocating for implementing langauges in an AST-less way or are you working towards maturing your language? You don't sound diametrically opposed to ASTs (which are evident in essentially any modern language), so I have to ask why V was not originally implemented with one and why you don't consider it a more important problem.

Using codegen to handle the JSON stuff is clever, sure, but it certainly makes me uneasy! It gives a very Jenga Tower impression of the state of the project...

[tastroder]

> Using codegen to handle the JSON stuff is clever, sure, but it certainly makes me uneasy!

Why? That thread seems to talk about this in the context of serialization and the way your parent poster is proposing is pretty common in the microprocessing world since dynamic parsing would be wasteful and, given fixed data structure, can be unnecessary in some cases.

Honestly, the most interesting thing to me as an outsider in that whole github issue you posted is how much mudslinging and animosity seems to be going around in the PL development community. It's not like people are forced to use alpha releases of random programming languages popping up on github.

[Yoric]

> You don't sound diametrically opposed to ASTs (which are evident in essentially any modern language)

Fwiw, I'm not sure what you mean by AST in the context, but if you're talking about an actual in-memory AST, there's (once again) research in getting rid of it for compilation.