I never understood the motivations behind V. It's clearly not a hobby project started out by a developer who is genuinely experimenting with PLs and want to put out something unique. It feels more like a stunt or a flair to either extort money or become famous. All that would be perfectly okay if V did what it claims to do but the author fanatically makes exciting claims but implements only fluff to hide the underlying broken machinery.
I tried V when it first got popular (about 3 years ago). I am no expert on languages but the way it was ductaped (AST-less compiler for "performance", a "graphic library" when even basic things don't work etc etc) made me eventually lose interest.
3 years later V is still mostly where I left it. If the V author focused on the stabilizing the compiler instead of starting off shoot projects like vui, vdb etc. it might actually work.
> It's clearly not a hobby project started out by a developer who is genuinely experimenting with PLs and want to put out something unique. It feels more like a stunt or a flair to either extort money or become famous.
Is that obvious? Yes, if I put on my cynical hat it pattern matches a money-grab or some other sort of fraud, but if I put on my charitable-interpretation hat V also perfectly pattern matches my idea of "solo developer wants to create the perfect language and goes after it with fresh eyes and a lot of enthusiasm (and yes, does get slowed down when it comes to fleshing out every little detail correctly and fully)". How do you distinguish?
Yeah, a lot of projects that fall through aren't actually made by scam artists or people trying to make a quick buck. I'd wager most of these are just by overly ambitious people that massively underestimate the challenge of getting there.
It's especially prevalent in indie gaming and large Kickstarters. Some are actually scams, but a lot are just entirely out of their depth and realize this too late/only when their deadlines come due. And yet there are content creators which just make video after video just shitting on these people. Quiet sad all around.
(Though that link from the sister comment does make it look quiet bad in this case. Projects that just make great sounding claims about the current state of the project, even though none of it is true can't be taken seriously in my opinion.)
> when it comes to fleshing out every little detail correctly and fully
In the case of V it's not only about details. Memory management, for example, is a fundamental part of a programming language and not something you can do as an afterthought. It is still not clear at all how memory management works in V.
The V language pattern matches with new programming language initiatives such as Odin or Zig. It is in the category of both C and Go alternatives.
Note- just by being a strong Go alternative by itself, one can see possible "behind the scenes" conflicts and motives. Though both V and Odin really should be fully embraced, because they continue the direction and changes in thinking started by Go, while providing features that such users might crave or have wanted.
V has been more successful than other newer programming languages at getting sponsors and supporters (check V's GitHub or vlang.io), to include publicity, both very good and at times negative (which appears to include angry detractors). It also has been developing at a more rapid pace than other languages in its category.
From looking at the history, some of the controversy appears to come from years ago and whether or not the language was real or was going to be released, because it was already "advertising" itself and had sponsors. Keep in mind that other languages have a very hard time at getting sponsors, supporters, or users. So, that another language getting what they are not able to or feel they deserve, can become a source of conflict as well.
My opinion is that the V creator did nothing wrong, because it was a very smart decision to attract sponsors and users, and the creator did release the language. This alone already separated V from the many languages we never know or hear about, the ability to get enough sponsors and supporters to sustain growth and momentum.
Yeah, it's might seem great to be a solo developer making what he/she feels is the perfect language as a hobby, but at some point the enthusiasm stops or the person realizes what's the point if nobody cares and nobody uses it.
Another aspect of this situation is it appears detractors were running with the narrative that V was "fake" or "vaporware", and then when it was actually released, they had to reset their narratives. You can't claim that something that exists and is used by many, is "fake" or non-existent. So then the attacks appear to then go for whatever might stick. Anything about the language, which is "not perfect" or as they feel is claimed, is then targeted. This is why we have these odd and controversial takedown attempts of a language which is still in alpha and evolving. I'm very much not saying that people shouldn't be criticizing or pointing out flaws, but rather it doesn't need the viciousness or underhandedness of trying to persuade people to stop using or attempts to kill it off.
Ultimately, just don't think that such tactics are going to work, because V has such strong community support and is continually improving. V is well on the path of becoming a very viable and highly useful language.
You must come from an alternative reality because all that V achieved in terms of popularity is a big initial uptick of GitHub stars and donations obtained thanks to straight-up, no-discussion, clear-as-sky false advertising.
When it comes to sponsors and donations, V is far (really far) from the best in the category. Not to mention that Zig has a proper non-profit foundation, which is a far greater achievement than GitHub stars or even sponsors.
All your comments in this thread are in disagreement with reality to the same absurdist degree of conspiracy theories. And of course you yourself can't help but point out that everything is a conspiracy against V, which is laughable.
A conspiracy theory is claiming that a competitor's compiler has a dependency on an OpenGL context creation library.
And it's laughable to claim that its popularity on launch was due to false advertising. Even your leader admitted that self hosting on launch is impressive:
> Wow, that's incredibly fast. Self-hosted in 2 weeks? Hot code reloading? This is everything I plan to do with Zig, but apparently done already. How did you do it so quickly?
(I hope you won't argue that V wasn't written in V on release.)
I'm not in the ZSF, although I do throw $50 a month to them, even though I don't use Zig. I use Rust a lot personally. I just like what Zig is doing. They haven't achieved all of their goals yet---just like V hasn't---but I look forward to when they do. And they've already produced some awesome stuff. While there are many differences between Zig and V, one of the most important ones is that Zig doesn't falsely advertise. If they did, I wouldn't contribute a single cent to them.
I totally agree with kristoff here and also munificent[1]. Y'all have a massive victim complex on grand display in this thread and exhibit the classical signs of projecting your own issues on to everyone else.
Ductaped languages can be extremely useful though (cf. PHP). But extraordinary claims were what failed V and---sadly and contrary to my remaining hope---continue to do so.
PHP was already ductaped at the point of PHP/FI 2 [1], when it became more or less a proper programming language. PHP survived despite its ductape nature.
Read correctly; I said extraordinary claims failed V. But the other reading doesn't seem to paint a pretty picture anyway. Every point made in the original article is a reasonable expectation by outsiders, and many of them are still unsatisfactory ("failed claims" if you like).
What you should do now is to decide what to do with those points instead of arguing. If the decision is WONTFIX (okay to do, not everything can be made into the language) then the advertisement should be updated (ProTip: you should really have done this years ago). If the decision is to do something with that then the advertisement should be still updated, hopefully with a link to the tracking issue. If you are already doing something about that then you still should have a link to the tracking issue. If the point is "misleading", then you should write out clearly why it's misleading, how the author could have concluded in that way (i.e. assume no malice and debug instead), and how to verify your updated claim. With no strings attached.
Honestly though these points have been iterated and reiterated years ago. I had a hope that you have learned (hard) from that past experience; my hope seems not justified.
Look, you are doing what I've just said not to do. I have nothing to say because the OP did most of claims already, you should directly respond to the OP.
And you are slightly altering the very claim you've already said; the OP specificially tests the claim that "V compiles [...] ~1 million (x86 and tcc backends) lines of code per second per CPU core", which I can easily verify on my machine (1m_helloworld.v took 25.5 and 15.5 seconds to compile under the same settings). To be fair these test files are edge cases you can easily dismiss (ProTip: you can make your advertisements more accurate), but edge cases show the weakness of your design and you should not confront them.
Let's not discount the hundreds of contributors, sponsors, and other developers that continually make contributions to and improve V.
The impression should not be given that V is just a one-man show. Many of the offshoot projects are in collaboration with others, not just the author, who have invested heavily in them and also wanted or helped create them.
Even when they are known to be scammers and frauds?
V's author is paying others to write things in V (even when basic functionalities don't work as advertised). They don't want to improve the language, they want to create a showcase to attract more funding, that's about it.
From what I've seen, V's author (along with other contributors and sponsors) have been constantly improving the language. Of which, these efforts are applauded by V's users and supporters.
As far as I'm concerned, V works as described in their documentation. As with any language, there are some specifics that are subject to interpretation or debate, but that is to be expected.
And, V is not doing anything that other languages also try to do in terms of sponsors and investors to sustain progress, increase popularity, or make improvements.
V (which is at 0.2.4) is using -gc boehm, which is presently the default. On present versions, you don't have to do anything to enable it. On older versions, you needed to enable -gc boehm. You can choose to use and enable Autofree (-autofree), which works, but you have to know what you are doing. Thus it's best to refer to examples of its usage. Then you can also manage memory manually, where of course you clearly must know what you are doing.
Autofree will not be the default until version 0.3 of the language. Autofree inserts free calls during compilation, and the rest is managed by RC. V will be giving users 3 choices: GC, Autofree, or manual. Those people that actually use the language, would already know this.
Thanks for linking Xe's blog here! It's a few years old and I've seen a lot of comments on HN that suggest V has improved significantly since 2019 so I thought it might be worth looking into for myself and writing down a review of what I found.
Is 'Xe' the name or the preferred pronoun of the person in question? Is this like Latinx but race neutral? Gender identity accommodations seem to get more complex and confusing by the month...
[correction] on their GitHub page I see: Please call me (order of preference): Xe/xer, They/them or She/her please.
[edit] obscure to have your pronoun also be your name (or maybe your title?). Or maybe it is all just satire, given: "I am an ordained minister with the Church of the Latter-day Dude. This allows me to officiate religious ceremonies in at least the United States." - https://dudeism.com
To be honest having a person's name be the same as their nominative case pronoun is kind of cool from a whole different perspective than you normally get to see. By doing this experiment I get to see how bad of an idea it is to do that. So far the xe/xer pronouns don't seem to stick as well, but it looks cool so I'm gonna keep up the experiment.
> To be honest having a person's name be the same as their nominative case pronoun is kind of cool
The whole point of a person's name is to sufficiently differentiate them from the other persons. Using pronoun as name (or vice versa) just totally negates this goal.
Who gives. Just use 'they' or 'them', or whatever. It is a universal catch all, gender neutral, i18n inclusivity conformant, ISO 69420 compliant, race neutral, etc.
At this point, all of it is basically designed to further confuse and only create a very monthly chaotic outcome for everyone.
Xe has been in use as a gender neutral pronoun for nearly thirty years. I, a startlingly ordinary person, was familiar with it as early as the late 90s.
Why in the world do competitors of this programming language insist on dragging out evaluations from 3 years ago, which state that V is vaporware and before the language was even released? This is 2022, not 2019, and we are talking a hundred releases later (https://github.com/vlang/v/releases).
At least stick to the current evaluation (or attack), which is more relevant, and make points from there. But, keep in mind that these attacks are on a young language that isn't 1.0 yet, so even with this we are talking about a moving target. The language is still evolving.
I don't have a horse in this race, but when a language makes present-tense claims about its features I assume that they're already functioning features.
People are poking holes in V because its claims are unfounded, not because they've decided they're in competition with the language. A simple "work in progress" sign on the features in question would draw a lot of fire away from the language and its creator.
After I criticized the project for collecting donations on deceitful information, the author put purple "WIP" labels next to a bunch of stuff [1] which led me to make this statement [2]. However, it looks like medvednikov has since removed the "WIP" labels.
From his perspective, he's been Working on them ;)
Credit to both you and him for the passion and effort put in. I just think his excitement bubbles over into an unfortunate way of communicating (lets call it cute)
Communication is something you're excellent at, in a large part due to your truthfulness
I just think vlang is living in and expressing dreams and visions. Which I agree has problems, but creating a language is an aspirational endeavour
You know something, some of us are HAPPY donators for 3 years now and we're fine and feel that our investment is worthy. I really think you are terribly misrepresenting the situation.
Your keep calling people "competitors." I don't think you're using the word right. Perhaps "detractors" is what you mean, but "reviewers" is more neutral. Xe and mawfig don't appear to be offering their own languages to compete with V. At one point, Andy Kelly (a "competitor") criticized the author's behavior, but he's also gone silent on the topic of V because of the vitriol he encountered.
One reason that people highlight older criticism is because it's useful to examine past behavior, past promises, and contrast them to current behavior and current promises. If V is going to improve its reputation, it's going to do it by (a) making good on the promises it can, (b) coming clean on the promises it can't, and (c) offer a clear win for some distinguishing featureset. Badgering people to shut up about the past isn't on that list.
> Andy Kelly (a "competitor") criticized the author's behavior, but he's also gone silent on the topic of V because of the vitriol he encountered
AFAIK your stated reason for the silence is not accurate. Andy’s criticisms were always based on V making claims that no one could evaluate because it was closed source/unreleased (and then used those claims to solicit money from people). Once V was made open source, those criticisms no longer applied, as things like TFA could be written.
No, he also had criticisms like "the V compiler depends on an OpenGL context creation library, so the claim that it has zero dependencies is false, the author is a scammer".
Financial supporter of V here. I don't feel scammed or misled at all. So keep speaking for yourself with the imaginary money you did not donate nor lose.
Nah that article is old as hell - time for new information. Things change.
I also despise how many people want to shit on this new language before it even takes off. Why are so many people frothing at the chance to disparage this language and it's author? Never seen something like this.
Mostly because the author completely scammed the shit out of people by promising a ton of things to garner patreon support before open sourcing what was essentially a hobby project at the time. I haven't followed it very closely, but last I heard about it was not delivering on the "autofree" feature.
I dont really care about the language. I've tried it a couple times and it's nothing special (to me) so I moved on, but I definitely understand where the hate comes from. The author essentially lied for at least months about his project to get financial support.
Quick edit: to actually add to the discussion, I think the weirdest thing about V is the odd support it does get. Most projects, especially compilers, with as much controversy as V would never get any support. I'm very curious what its proponents are using it for and why they choose V over pretty much any other language.
Oh, that's really cool to hear! I'm glad that they've turned around.
So, where can I download the version of V with non-nullable references, no uninitialized memory, no mutation without call-site mutability annotations, that can compile 1M loc/sec, and a functional autofree?
I was referring to both the original post, and Xe's older post that this comment thread is about. They both list claims made by V and describe details how they tested those claims and what their results were.
Do you have anything more legit because these posts have nonsense like "setting array length on creation is a terrible idea" (Go with its `make([]int, 5)` must be a terrible scam language as well) and measuring the performance of a debug build, with slow backend, without vlib cached, and with vfmt on.
You can see that V is actually as fast as is claimed on the website:
Well this is sure to be a reasonable thread with reasonable arguments coming from both sides. Surely the usual patterns of any vlang criticism won't pop out again.
Unfortunately, Vlang isn't a project out of an overeager young dev (not anymore at least), but at the same time, it hurts no-one. Sure, the author is making 1k a month out of it, but it's not like it's the scam of the century making him rich. I see startups on HN lying harder than that every week. Just let the dude make his stuff on his side, have a good laugh when articles like this come out, and that's it. Look at legitimate alternatives like Zig or Odin, and keep V as a fun little distraction when you want to see what overpromising looks like
My recommendation is that if you like the look of V, you should consider Zig or Odin as well. Personally, Zig seems like the most promising C-but-modern language due to the interesting compile-time programming features and impressive investment in toolchain infrastructure.
Something you'll see by reading the overview is the part where the Zig team themselves warn you that Zig is not a fully safe language and link to articles describing the safety boundaries. Scroll to the bottom of this section:
Zig is arguably not something similar enough that it would be attractive. Odin and Vlang are kind of offshoots of Golang, so would be more similar and attractive to those users. If a person is a Golang user, they would be more likely to see the advantages and possible improvements of Odin and Vlang.
“Those users” are a mystery to me. Who are they? Instead of talking about hypothetical persons, I am sharing my perspective and recommendation, as someone who learned C before learning Go, and who programs Go from time to time. To me, Go feels like C set to “Very Easy Mode”. Memory: specify layout but don’t worry about freeing it! I see Zig as C set to “Easy Mode”. More control than Go, can do all the C things as good as C, but memory management is explicit (like in C, but less tricky to get right).
Nah, very much personally dislike those two languages for various and many (predominantly technical, but some aesthetics are involved as well) reasons. V hits a sweet spot coming from a Ruby background.
I think of Vala as the “Swift of Gnome”. As in, a nice language primarily useful for programming in the World Of Gnome, like Swift is a nice language for programming in the World of Apple. I don’t use Gnome, so I’m not interested in their Swift. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Similar to a language like D. Technically quite good, but not quite compelling enough that it has picked up momentum that is likely to push it into the mainstream and generate a large library ecosystem.
> Variables aren’t immutable in any significant way because you can trivially turn an immutable reference into a mutable one.
To be fair, they didn't claim that the values were immutable, only the variables. Isn't the example in the article basically the same as Java's final variables, i.e. immutable references to mutable values?
> No global variables [...] Evaluation: V does not prevent you from creating and mutating globally shared state in any meaningful way.
Although I agree with the evaluation, the claim of "no global variables" might still hold, assuming it refers to mutable global variables. The global constant holds an immutable reference to a mutable value, just like how in Java a singleton object (or a class with mutable static fields) can be used to simulate global variables.
If I understand the example code correctly, it's modifying a heap-allocated struct that's pointed to by a global const. So the global const contains an address which is not modified, but the thing at that address is modified. Right?
What does the intended behaviour (after the fix) look like? Are mutable fields in structs disallowed if the struct is pointed to by a const?
Nim and Zig are both pretty interesting to me as up-and-coming languages so I do have them on a short list of things to try. This post took about a month of effort in my spare time to write so I don't think I will get to those anytime soon.
I had a look at the Oberon+ language definition and noted that one of the most annoying Oberon shortcomings (as compared to Modula-3) still remain:
...from the point of definition to the end of the scope...
Oberon+ should have a look at Active Oberon 2019, not for its "active" aspect, but for its syntactical and semantic improvements, like the correction of the above problem.
> ...from the point of definition to the end of the scope..
Not sure what you mean. Is it about the fact that all variables are declared in the header of the procedure, i.e. not somewhere in the body as e.g. in C# or Java? This is actually the same with Active Oberon and Modula-3. In case you mean that the order of declarations is relevant, Oberon+ assumes at least a two pass parser by design; a declaration sequence can contain more than one CONST, TYPE and VAR section in arbitrary order, interleaved with procedures, and the order of declaration is not relevant; see e.g. https://github.com/oberon-lang/specification/blob/master/The... and https://oberon-lang.github.io/2021/07/16/comparing-oberon+-w...
Sorry, but I read in your documentation:
The Programming Language Oberon+
....
4. Declaration and Scope Rules
....
The scope of an object x extends textually from the point of its declaration to the end of the block (module, procedure, or record) to which the declaration belongs and hence to which the object is local
It's a great idea, I nominate myself unless anyone more qualified steps in. It should take about a month. I will do what the author did and evaluate the claims the language makes one by one.
People like to dunk on V because of its author and community, but I will say that the design of the language itself (leaving aside the implementation) is genuinely interesting. To me, it feels like what Go should have been. And I like Go. So obviously I have a bit of a soft spot for V.
I'm sorry if you feel this is a dunk on V. Having seen quite a bit of discussion both on hacker news and other places saying that V has improved significantly since Xe's articles a few years ago, I thought it would be worth while to attempt a modern evaluation of the language based on where it is today. Throughout, I tried to ground my review by basing it on the claims the developers themselves make.
Would you mind expanding on your later comment? While I'm not a Go programmer, it's pretty easy for me to see why it has the features it has based on their commitment to fast compile times and being easy to learn. V on the other hand feels like an incoherent list of the biggest buzzwords in the industry right now with no clear overall design.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that this article itself was a dunk. I was commenting on the discussion I see elsewhere on the language (including elsewhere in this comments section). The article itself is a good summary of the problems with V — mostly with its implementation which does appear shoddy.
V’s design address many things I feel are lacking whenever I use Go: nil safety, sum types, option/result types, mandatory error checking. I think V is best understood in the context of being Go++.
Having looked a bit deeper though, the immutability and generics stuff does feel a bit bolted on, so I do see your point.
Am I wrong/naïve in thinking that a number of things mentioned here (no null pointer references, better bounds checking, immutability, pure functions by default) would be relatively easy to implement at least simple versions of in a language that compiles to C?
For example, the null pointer reference the author demonstrates would not be at all difficult to identify at compile time, it's literally just checking whether any structs are created with pointer properties initialized to 0. Checking for null pointers in all circumstances is much harder, but this particular example is easy. Why claim V supports this when it doesn't? Am I missing something about how hard it'd be to implement?
You're not wrong. For the most part, these would be relatively easy to implement.
Pure functions are the hardest of the ones you've identified -- they're nominally easy if you have perfect purity information, but pretty difficult (impossible, in the general case) if you don't or if your definition of "pure" is just plain incorrect (like V's is).
The criticism re: purity is silly. It can still be useful to design a language that is “mostly pure” because you’re mostly not trying to fuck your self over. For example OCaml is “mostly pure” and it’s tremendously beneficial in terms of writing correct software, regardless of the IO escape hatch or the ‘a ref explicit mutability etc.
(I don’t care for V one way or the other though, and most of the results in the post are clearly bad, I just find this particular point to be absurd).
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with impure programming languages. I use them every single day. My complaint is that V claims to be pure and is actually impure. To my knowledge, OCaml makes no claim to functional purity.
"ML-derived languages like OCaml are "mostly pure". They allow side-effects through things like references and arrays, but by and large most of the code you'll write will be pure functional because they encourage this thinking. Haskell, another functional language, is pure functional. OCaml is therefore more practical because writing impure functions is sometimes useful."
"V functions are pure by default, meaning that their return values are a function of their arguments only, and their evaluation has no side effects (besides I/O)."
Which means you are conceiving a strawman to mock.
The point is “no side effects other than IO” is a useful observation to make about how a language feels to use and the kinds of programs it encourages one to write.
Whether V is a good example of such a language I’ve no idea.
V's documentation is making it clear that it's not a purely functional language, so there should not be any such expectations. It also gives it's interpretation of what a pure function is, which other languages do as well, and there are various opinions about this.
You appear to be unbothered by OCaml describing itself as "mostly pure", whatever such "marketing" truly means, but seem to take strong offense to V. Seems like "mostly pure", in either case, should be equally acceptable or generate equal outrage.
This thread appears to be conflating two different things: whether a language is a "purely functional language" and whether the language's functions are "pure functions".
Presumably a purely functional language would, it seems to me, be exclusively (i.e. purely) functional, i.e. the functions in the language would always be pure. A language that has pure functions and impure functions, on the other hand, would not be "purely functional" as it contains impure parts, but it could still contain pure parts as well.
The issue with V seems to be that, although everyone agrees that it contains impure parts and thus is not a "purely functional language", the supposedly "pure functions" are also not actually pure, according to some reasonable definitions of purity.
I don't have a horse in this race, but ive always enjoyed playing with new languages from all paradigms.
My goto "test" is doing a simple webscraper and put results in a db.
The above is important and where I(your milage may vary allllot) think many fail or fail to some degree:
Its 2022 your new lang should have above excellent support for:
1) Multicore:(async, csp, threads) I dont care which just that it should be excellent and not some added library
2) We live in a inter-connected work: Thus I require your language to have above excellent support for things like: Http, websockets, json, encryption, auth,dbs etc.
3) Really bring something new or make coding in an alternative a pain. (stupid example: going back to posix threads in c, after coding i. go with channels)
4) Ecosystem:Hit the ground running, dammit if i spend 20 minutes getting a hello world with an external library up its too much ! Looking at you Python having to weave magic spells to get the correct versions and environment just so" is a absolute pain.
5) Pattern matching, immutability, functional, typing: Yea this is where people get very passionate* :) You probably have to include atleast one the above.
That being said my hat and github stars go out to all pl designers ! You at least took a shot and shipped something ! Bloody well done to you all !
Also if you looking to tinker look at janet and joy(web framework based on janet)
PS: Ive tried v in the past and it really was too bad(no program in production yet)
PS2: My dream lang would be lisp-like(more clojure than lisp) that compiles to go ?
I do not understand the hatred, reminds me of the last article of this kind. This language is in alpha. I've been in the Discord community since 2020 and no one would think of recommending the language for production use because it's WIP. Sure the goals are high and a lot of things don't work yet or are shaky but that's the way it is ATM. The wording of the article is simply not appropriate for the fact that the language is not even published. The community is small, active and also very friendly. I had a very good experience with Vlang in 2020 when I used it for Advent of Code and actually always got help when I got stuck with some bug.
I don't think this article contains any hatred. There is absolutely nothing wrong with an unfinished language - take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31775216 (2 days ago) for an example.
This article criticises V for presenting itself as a usable language, when it definitely isn't, with all these features which don't work.
I don't think it is fair to criticize the language like that without having "0.2 ALPHA" in the title of the ycombinator title and the article. In fact the hole article does not contain the word "alpha" or explaining the state once. It reads like that the language is expected to be ready and that all features need to work now, but they don't.
"At this time, I would not recommend spending time on V. I would also be very cautious when taking claims made by the authors at face value."
Also this point. Why does he recommend people to avoid the language. These people need contributors which help them to improve their language. It is open source. Maybe it is because I'm not native, maybe you are right.
I'm also curious if the author even tried to interact with the community/developers to get his examples to work. I'm not that good of a developer to rate the things he is claiming, so I don't know.
Hopefully he created some bugs on github so the developers have at least the chance to fix the issues he is talking about.
> Why does he recommend people to avoid the language. These people need contributors which help them to improve their language. It is open source.
This is why the "critic" can also be interpreted (or misinterpreted) as another attack. It's one thing if this was a blog evaluating the claims of multiple programming languages, but it being a very specific and dedicated critic of V, looks strange.
To include it uses the term "we" a lot in the summary, as if it was a collaboration effort by a group of programmers directed at V. It is unknown who are the "we" being referred to.
"We’re able to create a null pointer (V reference) with no compiler errors or warnings."
"We weren’t able to shadow local variables."
If the evaluation was in the spirit of improving the language (as it is still alpha) or pointing out things that need to be addressed, then one would expect it to be presented as various issues or bugs on V's GitHub. There would not be any blindsiding or surprise, but an exchange between the evaluator(s) and V's developers and contributors.
Parts of the evaluation and summary are debatably subjective. The categories of purity, sum types, generics, speed, and compiling are among them. So getting direct feedback from the developers and contributors of V would have been much more fair and helpful.
But I understand what you are saying. Back when I tried the language I expected an unfinshed state because of the version number, but I guess they should make more clear that the features are the goal and not the state what is working currently.
Funny, I've never had any misgivings or unfulfilled expectations so far. I suppose my "defaults" are a bit different than others. Very disheartening to see the world in such a state as people feel its necessary to waste times with negative activities vs trying to build and uplift.
This is strong point that is conveniently overlooked. That the language is alpha and 0.2.4, should be clue enough that it is a WIP by default (at this point), by those that have actually tried it.
Valid criticisms of the language should arguably be more directed towards its issues on GitHub (https://github.com/vlang/v/issues), in addition to any blog or article, where the contributors and developers can address them.
When approached correctly, and not in an adversarial and combative way, I've seen the V community be very friendly and helpful.
By the way, the collection of snippets of V (Vlang) examples on Rosetta Code has become quite significant. People are demonstrating how to use it over there as well.
Hopefully what is not being suggested is that creators of open-source programming languages are not allowed to revise their release schedules, underestimate, or change the number of features it will have.
Languages such as Nim have took 11 years before reaching 1.0, so V is still doing comparatively well. V's pace of development has been quite fast and substantial. More comparable languages such as Zig and Odin have yet to hit 1.0 as well, and are many years older.
Yes, the pace of development is getting faster and user patience less, but V should still be afforded some leeway in this regard.
At this point, why do people even spend time on debunking the marketing claims of this language at all? It's been done to death, whoever was going to be convinced the V developer is a charlatan has already been convinced. For better or for worse.
For what it's worth, there has been some progress on the language and the author has responded to past criticism. I've been following developments of the language for a few years now, and I'd love it if all the claims came to fruition. Since it's a work in progress, past criticism doesn't necessarily apply -- leaving me to wonder "is it not bullshit yet?" Since the author has a habit of overpromising and even declaring things finished before even starting on them, and newcomers might not know what to think, his claims warrant regular scrutiny. It appears that V is still for vapor.
TFA has plenty. Don't let yourself get mired in fights on the orange site. Instead, spend the energy fixing bugs and you'll meet less criticism in the future.
I think that V developers and contributors are well within their rights to address criticisms of their work by detractors. Additionally, the OP has ran away from engaging in debate about various errors and opinions from their review, in an apparent attempt to leave an arguably underhanded one-sided negative impression (which includes suggesting not to use).
So we have a situation where the OP created a hit piece with no feedback from V developers or its community, and detractors are elaborating on it, that leaves few other public options to address it.
> I think that V developers and contributors are well within their rights to address criticisms of their work by detractors.
Indeed you are, but realize that you are also ambassadors for your language, and engaging in petty language war nonsense on public forums doesn’t leave anyone looking great. That’s a problem for V moreso than your detractors, because you are the ones building a reputation for yourselves, while your detractors are relatively anonymous and fungible. They can act anyway they want and it won’t follow them around.
On the other hand, everything said here by Vlangers will stick to V and will be brought up on the next thread. You don’t want the reputation of being fanboys who will descend on any thread about V and zealously argue about it for days. But that’s the reputation you’re building here, and it has nothing to do with the behavior or actions of anyone else. That’s something you are actively choosing to do, and it doesn’t make you or your community look good.
Again, no one looks great in threads like these, but most people here aren’t building a reputation. V is building a reputation. What do the posts by Vlangers here say about V? It’s not exactly a shining advertisement for your community.
OP made a good faith effort hoping to find a sweet and working language, and the current implementation fell short of its long-advertised promises and accomplishments. That you're calling it a "hit piece" is telling. Y'all are well within your rights to waste your time arguing. I'm just saying that it's a waste of time.
I believe I know who the OP is and it's a very sad situation of simple hurt feelings from largely misunderstanding. It's a sad situation actually, but such is life and differences of cultures and human interaction. I feel bad for the OP to have had to have felt so badly that they felt the necessity to post this hit piece vs trying to really address the issues that other community members have gathered from it as actual issues to resolve. So sad.
I think everyone wants a "Rust but better" language to exist, and that very well might be V in 5 years, but Rust wasn't advertising features as 'completed' years before they were implemented/stable and neither should V. Continuing to point out the design issues will either get the marketing claims removed (just throw up a roadmap!) or articles like this will be used to show V's progress in a distant future.
I wouldn't bet a single dollar on V improving to any qualitative level. It's been a surprisingly large transpiling hack. Graydon Hoare had some PLT knowledge before going on doing Rust, it's not just feature names and potential impl.
> wants a "Rust but better" language to exist, and that very well might be V in 5 years . . .
How can anyone possibly believe this?? What is the motivation?? V is a `README` full of desires, and a source tree full of incompetence. There is no concrete or technical evidence that can support this optimism. Zig is a serious project. Go is a serious project. Rust is a serious project. V is, obviously, an un-serious project.
Everyone wants that? Not even everyone wants something like Rust. But I doubt that everyone who programs in Rust (and like it somewhat) want Rust-but-better (when that entails learning a completely different language, at least).
There’s some value to people that don’t refresh the front page 10 times a day. I’ve only ever seen the language mentioned in passing and saw the shiny website, but not that it’s all utterly bs. Also as the author said apparently there’s been claims of improvement since the last debunking post, and it seems like it’s still vapourware.
I have no horse in the race, and having never seen the controversy, it does seem suspicious that the language author is making money off of claims that simply aren’t true. The amount of stars on GitHub compared to actual activity on comparable repos does indicate that the marketing is working though, the claims being made are taken at face value, not the WIPs that they actually are.
I too can dream of a perfect language, but it doesn’t mean I should put up a website claiming that I’ve actually made it and it’s real.
I'm personally holding out some hope that it'll eventually live up to its marketing claims - which means that I'm interested in seeing whether or not it has progressed in that direction in the last 3 years.
Have a look at the GitHub repo, it’s very active and there are clearly some passionate people putting a lot of work into it. So it’s worth looking at the language again every now and then.
I tried V when it first got popular (about 3 years ago). I am no expert on languages but the way it was ductaped (AST-less compiler for "performance", a "graphic library" when even basic things don't work etc etc) made me eventually lose interest.
3 years later V is still mostly where I left it. If the V author focused on the stabilizing the compiler instead of starting off shoot projects like vui, vdb etc. it might actually work.