[Normille]

What a piss-poor excuse for an article! Reads like a press release; all puff and no down sides.

Anyone with any familiarity with the V project will know it's been mired in controversy from day 1, thanks to the [often hyperbolic] claims of its inventor. All of which seems to have passed the author of this article by, as he just gushingly repeats them unquestioningly.

Mind you, he does describe V as "all new", so maybe he missed all that previous discussion.

[ibraheemdev]

The article seems to have been written by:

> a 15 year old student who likes to code and blog

for some perspective :)

[throwaway4good]

It is a new generation: sales, hype and marketing first.

We all could learn from this.

[WithinReason]

I think we were all more susceptible to hype when we were 15

[throwamon]

Maybe, but I can tell you when I was 15 I didn't have instant worldwide reach and the on-the-Internet-nobody-knows-you're-a-dog effect at my disposal, and neither did my readers.

[throwaway4good]

I grew up with if you build people will come.

I don’t think it is like that anymore …

[Normille]

Now it's "tell people you're thinking of building it and they will come"

[see Kickstarter et al.]

[delian66]

I think/hope that it is still like that, just that haters are a subset of people, whose opinions are currently disproportionately magnified.

[sieste]

HN is usually an incredibly welcoming and encouraging community. Any criticisms are honest, sometimes harsh and maybe on the overly sceptical side, but mostly decent and civilised ... Unless Vlang comes up.

> What a piss-poor excuse for an article!

The article is no different from many new-sexy-js-framework blog posts I see here, but these never get that amount of hate. Why is that?

[Tozen]

Good point. It's odd how certain people get so fired up to bash and troll Vlang, then also state they never use it or refer to some controversy from 3 years ago that has lost its relevancy.

Additionally, somehow other newer languages like Odin, Crystal, and Zig seem to escape their wraith and trolling despite having some similar developmental issues. Very selective "hate".

[ksec]

>Unless Vlang comes up

Yes that is why I am surprised it is still on the front page. Normally anything to do with Vlang get flagged within a few hours on HN.

[Tozen]

Exactly. Yet and for example, Zig and Nim articles are posted at will without issue. Recently, Zig related ones have been very numerous, as if people had invested stock into it. In contrast, Vlang related ones often get flagged for unknown reasons. Quite strange. Where is the fairness?

[ksec]

Well, Zig hasn't been numerous. If you do a search on Rust and Zig you will see Rust submission is something like 10-20:1 ratio with headline going at 3-5:1 within one month period. But yes zig is getting some traction on HN. (I have been tracking it ever since Rust people complain about the number of Zig submissions. )

And HN has a hatred for Vlang because arguably it start off in the wrong foot with too many over promising features. I thought we should give Vlang some benefits of doubt. Instead HN simply shoot down all Vlang submission. And it only takes a few people flagging it for it to disappeared from the front page. Yes I dont think it is fair. I wish we can all submit some obscure, unknown programming language to the front page. Unfortunately I am not sure what the solution to that would be, may be email @dang about it?

[ylluminate]

Yeah some jealous "communities" poisoned the water. It's really sad.

[dmytrish]

Because nobody wants to deal with another PHP in the unlikely case V takes off.

[amedvednikov]

It's hard to find a language farther away from V than PHP.

[pwdisswordfish9]

I dunno, the design philosophy seems ripped out of their (former, to their credit!) playbook.

https://twitter.com/woketopus/status/1447150924846313475

[ylluminate]

Lol. You're not speaking the same English bub.

[amedvednikov]

V's design is completely opposite.

[bvrmn]

Early PHP lack of any design is the same of V.

[ylluminate]

You'd probably enjoy this one better from a major magazine then: https://linuxformat.com/ - see page 94 in the May 2022 volume. Screenshot of ToC: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/592106336838352923/96...

[amedvednikov]

Can you list the hyperbolic claims here please?

[Normille]

Well, for a start there's the "Translating DOOM from C to V and building it in 0.7 seconds" which is still on your front page. In spite of being a 'WIP' for as long as I can remember.

Then there's; vweb, vorum, volt and ved [all of which feature prominently on the front page too] which have been little more than alpha quality proofs of concept for a similarly long time.

Don't get me wrong; I was actually interested in V when I first heard about it a few years back. And I was prepared for there to be a lot of 'WIP' since the language was so new. But I lost interest as the years passed and nothing more polished ever seemed to emerge.

In fact the whole ethos of the V community seems to be to take the maxim "Move fast and break stuff" and stretch it to breaking point. Instead of anything actually being worked on, polished and finished, you just keep throwing out new headline grabbing 'projects' which, as per the examples above are barely functional and seem to be abandoned almost as soon as they are announced. One week it'll be a new game engine [naturally, because it's V, better, stronger faster than anything already out there], the next week a web framework [better, stronger, faster...etc], the week after that it'll be a new 3D engine [better, stronger, faster...]

I even remember a while back someone[s] in the V community announced they were building an OS in V. [presumably better, stronger, faster than Linux, OSX, Windows, etc]

That's why you get so much negative press. It's not because people want to hate V. A hell of a lot of people [especially in the HN demographic] were genuinely interested in the project. But the endless hyperbole just ends up making you sound like a snake oil salesman and your crowd loses interest and drifts away.

[amedvednikov]

vweb, volt, and ved are not a "little more than alpha"

yes, the os is being developed in V, and it can already run bash, GCC, G++, and Doom.

https://github.com/vlang/vinix

the person working on it, is an osdev, and not a compiler developer

[Normille]

OK. In the interests of fairness, I'll take another look at V. Because I did like the look of it when I dabbled a few years back. I found it a bit like Go but without the annoying boiler-plate `if err != nil...` everywhere, it did seem to compile and run quickly and I did remark at the time that it had some of the most helpful error messages I'd found in any programming language.

I'm not a professional coder though. I only knock together hacky stuff for my own purposes. So I have to bow to the superior collective opinion on HN when it comes to the more esoteric qualities of any language, such as its memory handling, efficiency, etc.

So I am a long way from being the 'Hater' half the comments seem to suggest. Although the younger generation are hypersensitive these days that just disagreeing with someone else's opinion is enough to have you accused of 'hate crime'.

PS: I've also been dabbling with Crystal, which has for me the nicest syntax out of the Go / V / Crystal triumvirate that I keep drifting between, in my quest for the "One True Language to Rule Them All" that I can learn relatively easily and use for my personal hacking needs. Unfortunately Crystal suffers from a lack of tooling and some of the most unhelpful error messaging I've come across.

So there you go. That was some love for V.... or was it a 'hate crime' against Crystal? It's so hard to not cause offence, these days.

[amedvednikov]

> So I have to bow to the superior collective opinion on HN

You shouldn't do that. There's a lot of misinformation regarding V on this site.

Always best to try things yourself, with V it's very fast and simple.

[pxeger1]

Here's an article from around the time, "V is for Vaporware": https://christine.website/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23 (and discussion of that on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258485)

I imagine things have improved since 2019, though.

[amedvednikov]

It's a very biased and old list of articles from an author who openly claimed that "V should die".

For example, the performance of V is measured on a debug build, without vlib cached, without vfmt disabled, with a 10x slower backend.

Here's V compiling itself in 0.3 seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc

Also complaining about not running on all Linux flavors on day 1. Right now V runs on literally everything.

And so on.

That's why I asked to list the specific claims the poster had in mind here in the comments.

[pwdisswordfish9]

> an author who openly claimed that "V should die".

Citation needed. Or is the source for that claim the same as that for V benchmarks?

[amedvednikov]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27442724

> I think it is something that should be ignored until it dies into obscurity

[Micoloth]

> thanks to the [often hyperbolic] claims of its inventor

To be fair.. I always see this in HN comments about V, and at this point it sounds just as a non-objective and prejudiced evaluation as the article is.

I agree that the article should have presented some downsides. But to start a discussion, how about presenting some valid criticisms?

Clearly people have worked on this project for a while. Have they completely failed to implement the “hyperbolic” claims? Or are they doing something good?

I’ve been intrigued about V for a while, i haven’t had the time to look into it yet.

I wish we had an objective discussion about it..

[lf-non]

Quite a bit of work has indeed gone into the language, and what has been accomplished is no mean feat, but the myriad open bugs [1] around core features of the compiler do not inspire confidence.

It'd be better if the documentation reflected that the language was in an alpha state rather than touting stability guarantees etc.

[1] https://github.com/vlang/v/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+lab...

[amedvednikov]

All big projects have open GitHub issues. You just linked to 500 open and 3000 closed bugs in V.

For example, Rust has 8000 open/35000 closed. Yet it's a very mature language.

V is very stable for its age. The compiler can build itself since the release (it now has 220k lines of V!) and we have big projects like the Vinix OS written entirely in V, and it can already run GCC/g++ and Doom for example.

[lf-non]

Ok, I'll try it out once more. Last I tried it a simple program I wrote using the ui toolkit was crashing for some issue I couldn't quite figure out. Maybe things have substantially improved since.

[ruune]

I had the same experience. Tried out V a couple of weeks ago because I needed a really simple GUI application. Compiling example code resulted in errors I couldn't understand nor google. I enjoyed playing around with V until that point, but went back to Go and built my stuff with some giant UI library into a 10mb binary that at least worked how it should. I like V though so I will try it out again sometime

[amedvednikov]

That's strange. All examples are compiled via CI on all systems.

[Brian_K_White]

It's definitely not anyone's fault for not taking this seriously.

I thought it was a gag and only these comments make me think it might possibly be a real language.

[ylluminate]

Definitely real and definitely awesome. Give it a try - it's very quick to compile from source (git clone; make - all in roughly under a few seconds).

[ylluminate]

Nice to see there are some small projects (program) that have been running for 2 years (backend services) written on very early V. Quite interesting insomuch that when you get something compiled that does what you want, it works very well.

[_andrei_]

There's people that have what it takes to build something like V, and then there's the rest of us, that spend our time ranting online.

[coldtea]

And there are also people who have built even harder projects than V, but can still criticize projects with issues and rant with the best of them!

The absolute dichotomy being "doers" and "criticizers" is false. Linus could criticize things just fine.

[_andrei_]

Doers can of course criticize, but serious devs won't bash a new and unfinished language, just because the author of the project had the audacity to promise something "so unrealistic".

Healthy people saw V, maybe read about it, saw the great promises, and thought "Ha, that sounds unlikely, but it's not a bad idea, it would be insane if this worked! Shoot for the stars, aim for the moon.".

For others, the promises were outrageous and anything remotely close to them "impossible". I don't get why it got personal for some of us, and it's stupid how involved people were over the years (hey Xe, you're so skilled, why waste your energy) into bashing this random project.

[scns]

Have seen Linus giving the finger to Nvidia, but not ranting on a forum about a new language.

[dmytrish]

Here you go: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus

[kaba0]

This website boils my blood every time it comes up - like look at their considered harmful list, it is seriously ridiculous.

[delian66]

I did not know that C++ is new in 2007 ...

[coldtea]

I have seen Joe Armstrong, Alan Kay, Paul Graham, and many others ranting about other languages in many ocassions...

[knackforthis]

Lol this right here. This is it. "all skepticism is equally valid". A crock of nonsense. One side has pointed out, repeatedly, how that statement is true. If you don't know better, that's on you. This whole "aww my subjectivity" completely ignores the wisdom of the crowd of "no, really, this is snake oil, can we fucking not".

But as usual, people are looking to have an opinion spoonfed and are upset when it's not the narrative they wanted.

[ylluminate]

Delivering. Fantastic community and contributions. Love them.