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by kgeist 1524 days ago
>But it's not finished yet. We saw a better performance with a GC (due to all the extra copying autofree has to do), and made it the default

On vlang.io I can find this:

>Most objects (~90-100%) are freed by V's autofree engine: the compiler inserts necessary free calls automatically during compilation. Remaining small percentage of objects is freed via GC.

So it's been 2 years and it's still unfinished, and you just use Boehm GC instead (from what I understood). Isn't your landing page a little misleading? This is the problem with V: a lot of grandiose claims but at the end of the day you use a GC used in every other toy language.

1 comments

But it says right there:

Note: right now autofree is hidden behind the -autofree flag. It will be enabled by default in V 0.3.

Using gc means it's a toy language? Got you.

>Using gc means it's a toy language? Got you.

No, I mean it's a common characteristic of toy languages to use Boehm GC because it requires zero configuration to work, as it scans conservatively. It doesn't require you to emit stack maps or provide the GC with type metadata. Boehm GC means low effort (in regards to memory management). It's perfectly fine to use it, and it's an amazing library itself, but it contrasts with all the claims on the landing page (in the section "innovative memory management").

A toy language is a term for a computer programming language that is not considered to fulfill the robustness or completeness requirement of a computer programming language.
Then by this definition and by example of what has been done with V so far, it's definitely no "toy language."
I don't think V has proven its robustness or completeness. One thing that could change my mind is if one of the applications got completed and was actually usable.

For example, I'm really interested in the Volt thingy - a lightweight, multiprotocol chat application:

    https://volt-app.com/
But if you open the website, you can see that there is no Linux or Windows support, and most protocols are not yet implemented. I've searched for other projects written in V, and haven't found a single completed project.