[johnfn]

I don't really agree. V seems to attract a much larger than normal swath of people who enjoy trying to score points off of technicalities. e.g. people claiming the entirety of V is an unsafe language because they found a single bug in the compiler, etc. Languages like Rust never garner this sort of point scoring in the comments.

> as far as I've seen they are quick on the trigger in regards to banning or blocking people that they disagree with

Do you have any source for this claim? Without a source this simply reads as another person trying to sow uncertainty and doubt. I haven't seen anyone banned or blocked on Github.

[wb13579]

That's because V already lied once about its memory management, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947048. Any highlighting of that fact is met with deflection and dodging.

V is still making dubious claims: his newly invented autofree isn't stable even today after years and users are encouraged to use garbage collection instead. It's hard to trust that when we've been lied to already.

[Tozen]

V is not 1.0, so why so bothered that autofree isn't stable enough? Especially if the person is not even using V. Clearly the majority of V supporters and users are not bothered, and are finding V useful to them.

Autofree exists and somewhat works (https://youtu.be/gmB8ea8uLsM), it's a matter of perfecting it so that it requires minimum user knowledge about memory management. You can enable Autofree and use it, but the user must understand what they are doing and reference examples of code and programs that do use it.

So in the mean time, the V developers decided to experiment with and select GC as an alternative memory management method. That should not be a problem for a language in Alpha, nor for anybody "outside looking in", that understands language development. GC usage worked out great for them and the users, so they made it the default. Autofree and manual, would be the other options that users can choose, but they must enable those.

Furthermore, other languages like Nim, have multiple memory management options. I don't see people on HN getting so hot and bothered about that, just for some strange reasons, they seem oddly bothered by V adopting and having multiple options (GC, Autofree, and manual) instead of one.

[johnfn]

What? "After years and years"... It's version 0.3. Not even stable 1.0. The conversation you had with the maintainer puts you in a worse light than him, in my opinion.

[wb13580]

He's already promised something too good to be true and it turned out to be a lie. From wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/...: "(Work in progress) There's no garbage collection or reference counting. V cleans everything up during compilation. If your V program compiles, it's guaranteed that it's going to be leak free."

I was excited for that. We were all excited for that. Then it wasn't true. I would forgive him but he seems to be continuing.

Then he walks that promise back, pretends he never said it and suddenly invents this magical "autofree" system but gives no details on how it works. Rust was never that secretive, it was based on published theory.

He claims it removes 90% of reference counting but if that was possible then Swift or Python or anyone else would have done it.

If it was based on solid precedent, or there was any research, or he published anything about how it works, or he didn't take donations, or it wasn't advertised on the website, it would be fine. But that's not the case.

[sime2009]

Let me get this straight. Someone is running an open source project. They said they are working on some ambitious feature. Said ambitious feature hasn't materialised up to your standards, and now you feel like you've been cheated or lied to?

Maybe you should ask for your money back.

[Tozen]

So are we saying that open source programming languages are not allowed to make changes to their goals, features, or roadmaps?

And if they do make any changes, then people should go to the wayback machine and hold them accountable to what was in the past, and not what they are showing and saying in the present?

Seems to be very unrealistic, and more of a personal grudge or pet peeve.

[richbell]

These aren't mutually exclusive. What isn't captured in individual posts about V is the historical context of previous discussions.

I think many people feel scorned or resentful towards the attitudes, which means they're more likely to speak negatively of it in the future.

When V was first announced, there was a lot of hype about "Volt": a cross-platform Slack app written in V (https://web.archive.org/web/20190315173156/https://volt-app....). It was slated to be released 'soon', but months went by and there was nothing. When it eventually did release, it was nowhere near as complete or polished as people were being lead on to believe. Same thing with V itself, and people were attacked for pointing this out.

There's a long history of over-promising or hyping things that don't exist, and not handling constructive criticism well. So there's a number of people who actively dislike V.

[mst]

Right, people who dislike me will call me a massive arsehole (and not necessarily be wrong) but V-lang stans leave -me- cold.

[amedvednikov]

Exactly. The amount of nitpicking is ridiculous.

There's an entire article half of which is about a single checker bug that has already been fixed.

Or claims like "it uses official system api (libc), therefore you can't say it doesn't have dependencies".