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by Micoloth 1518 days ago
> 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..

4 comments

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...

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.

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.
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
That's strange. All examples are compiled via CI on all systems.
Maybe that was an error on my end then, early in the morning lying in bed stuff. And iirc the UI library did say it was in an early stage or something like that.

(I think you are the author, or at least involved in the language? I don't want to come off as simply bashing your language. Most people here seem to do enough of that... Definitely didn't try it out enough to have any opinion on the advanced features mentioned. I enjoyed the Go-like syntax with different ideas though. So definitely keep going)

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.

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).
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.
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.
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.

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.

Have seen Linus giving the finger to Nvidia, but not ranting on a forum about a new language.
This website boils my blood every time it comes up - like look at their considered harmful list, it is seriously ridiculous.
I did not know that C++ is new in 2007 ...
I have seen Joe Armstrong, Alan Kay, Paul Graham, and many others ranting about other languages in many ocassions...
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.

Delivering. Fantastic community and contributions. Love them.