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by amedvednikov 1520 days ago
Can you list the hyperbolic claims here please?
2 comments

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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

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