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by lagniappe 1117 days ago
> Go: Go is amazing. But it does have garbage collection, which can cause lag spikes in some cases. The creators were also very late on implementing common sense features, such as package versioning and generics. There are some other small mistakes, but the point is that we lack trust in their descission making.

> Rust: Rust right now might be the best language out there right now. It's hard for us to criticize them because we lack the experience of building big rust projects. We do however think rust has a really slow compiler. We also think that rust might be too idealistic where it restricts the developer too much.

> C: C is obviously the best but... we dont always want to manage our own memory. Also their std-lib lacks alot of basic functions. You are forced to work with makefiles or similar build tools and most of those tools are very badly designed.

> C++: C++ is like a worse version of c. They do have the most features of any language, which allows the developers to write the greatest code and also the worst code. You let a developer work on a project for a year and suddenly you are looking at a codebase full of OOP, templates and the most hacky preprocessor logic you've ever seen. That developer says it's built using todays greatest standards, yet no one is able to understand the code at all. Sometimes you have to limit bad practices.

> Other: All other languages use garbage collection which makes them hard to use for millisecond realtime applications. Secondly, most languages allow you to have undefined behaviour.

I'm not sure if this section is really making the case you wanted to make. Either this needs to be rephrased or scrapped all together, it doesn't present the best foot forward because ideally you are recruiting people from these languages, and in your descriptions of them you make some very facile comparisons.

5 comments

Why not make Swift a truly cross-platform language? I find it to be in a sweet spot between safety, performance and usability.
Zig seems to have similar goals and be rather further along, thay would be a good comparison language. I feel that zig's error handling is cleaner that ki's
>"Sometimes you have to limit bad practices."

The way to do it I think is to properly mentor / monitor juniors rather than tying up hands of experienced developers.

I removed this section from the website. As others said, the text is not good and not really helpful.
V-lang doesn't have GC, and how it compares to it?
V-lang is vaporware, designed to get Patreon bux off of gullible enthusiasts.

See this post [0] from 2019. Things don't seem to have got much better in recent years [1] [2] [3].

[0] https://xeiaso.net/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230351

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31793554

I've got no particular interest in V, but the hate it gets from a certain group of people here is really perplexing and I don't think it's at all warranted from what I've seen.
I've had similar sentiment when I first seen V. However, after a brief and unpleasant conversation with the developer who was extremely defensive against any, even valid, criticism - especially related to the false advertising! - made me change my mind. Alex knows very well what he's doing, he's a grifter who is collecting money off of smoke and mirrors, and his language still hasn't reached any remotely usable state.
Yeah it's weird. They seem to have the same copy-pasted message ready with some old links and whatever they could gather that's more recent. Never fails.

As far as I can see V is well placed on TechEmpower so it must be doing something right at least: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&tes...

Maybe they didn't deliver on all their claims yet, so what? They seem to be trying something cool. Certainly not reason for all the vitrol.

The devs burned their reputation by repeated blatant lying.
Was it the V devs lying, or was it their near competitors and various evangelists continually spreading misinformation and doing constant media/social media attacks?
I too found it perplexing, and agree it's the right thing to call it out. As you and hu3 noticed, the methodology and continually spamming the same old posts and websites when the language is mentioned is consistent. When looked at as a whole, it comes across as an continual effort by certain parties (and wherever or whenever possible), to bully others for having different preferences or paint a very misleading and negative picture about Vlang (V-lang) for their benefit or purposes.

It's odd how obvious slanderous remarks and insults directed at developers (like grifter), in addition to provably false statements (like vaporware) are being pushed about the project (like language is unusable), don't seem to get removed. Somehow, that gets left up. Not just here, but other threads too.

Yet, attempts to directly refute or at least push back on the barrage of misinformation about a clearly popular GitHub project get flagged, downvoted, or removed. Don't think that would at all be tolerated if such was done to other open source developers and languages, nor for as long (many years). It isn't right nor is it fair.

A certain set of what?
Vaporwave, or vaporware?
Good catch, thanks. Fixed.

Seems like I've been listening to Crystal Castles too much these days.

I think v-lang is faster than ki, rust, go. But their memory management isnt waterproof. Also, they have been in development for a really long time and there isnt much progress. They should have reached 1.0 by now, but they havent and i think it's because the language might have problems.

oh and, v-lang does have GC. they use boehm gc.

> ...they have been in development for a really long time and there isnt much progress.

> They should have reached 1.0 by now...

These are strange statements. People having any familiarity with newer programming languages are likely to not know or be confused by where this is coming from.

V is a relatively new language that came out in 2019 and is in beta. So comparatively speaking, V has progressed well at the least, debatably quite fast. V also has more GitHub stars than all the listed below languages (in beta) combined (per OSS Github language rankings). Let's look at the starting dates for these popular and newer languages:

1) Zig came out in 2016 and is still in beta.

2) Odin came out in 2016 and is still in beta.

3) Jai started in 2014 (full time around 2017) and is still in beta.

4) Red came out in 2011 and is still in beta.

The languages that we see today, which are popular and at the top of the rankings (like TIOBE) are significantly to quite old. Among the youngest languages in the top 20 (your post mentions Rust and Go), they came out in 2015 (Rust), 2014 (Swift), and 2009 (Go). All of these have huge corporate support.

I thought v was older, hmm, ok. But still, all these languages should have reached 1.0 by now. Except for jai, because jblow has other things todo. Wasnt c created in 2 weeks?
> Wasnt c created in 2 weeks

No, because C was derived from B. B was created in 1969 and was much of the basis of what would become C, which is given the release date of 1972. So we can make the argument of at least around 3 years of development, of what would be named C, before reaching a stable or usable enough state.

Languages and goals were much simpler in the past. Stages of development like alpha, beta, or what was 1.0 get kind of mixed up. It's not as clear a process, as we have today.

> Except for jai, because jblow has other things todo

Surely the other language creators had/have other things going on too. One of the main differences, that was attempting to clarify in the previous post, is that certain programming languages have huge corporate backing, which affects their development time. C (AT&T), Go (Google), Rust (Mozilla), and Swift (Apple) have reached 1.0 or stability faster, because of who they have supporting and pushing them.

Independent and more grassroots projects can sometimes achieve 1.0 in comparable times. But, this seems related to how exceptionally talented the lead developers are, experienced (as created other languages before), goals of the project (simpler is often easier), popularity, or how many contributors and sponsors got involved.

Crystal, looks to have took around 7 years to reach 1.0 (though with Windows support issues). Julia, comes in at about 9 years. Nim, another notable project, appears to have took around 11 years. We might can expect things to go a bit faster now, than back then, but within reason. And referring to programming languages that are reasonably well known and used.

Does a hello world still leak memory?
in v? i have no idea, never used it.
V has flexible memory management. This is stated on their website and documentation:

1) Uses GC as a convenient default and is optional (can be turned off with -gc none)

2) Can use autofree (enabled with -autofree)

3) Can use arena allocation (enabled with -prealloc)

4) Can be managed manually (-gc none)