[isaiahg]

It became one of those hate memes. A target of irrational fervor among anyone caught in between. If you ask those angered they pull out a list of petty grievances a mile long composed of misleading or highly interpretive wrongs.

I haven’t had the pleasure to try out V yet but I hope this discussion can rise above. Endless bickering leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

[kbknapp]

> If you ask those angered they pull out a list of petty grievances a mile long composed of misleading or highly interpretive wrongs.

How can you assert that they're misleading or highly interpretive wrongs if you haven't dug into them yourself and actually used V? All the negative press I've seen on V has been highly detailed and reproducible.

[isaiahg]

You don’t need to have touch it to see. Just browse this thread. A big one mentioned is over promising, which is pretty interpretive for a language only on version 0.4 of its development cycle. Most other complaints are slight variations of this. Promising magic performance or magic features without a good explanation, is another variation. This would be well and good for a fully released language, which this is not. All that tells me is the creator is overly ambitious for their own good and possibly naive, which I hardly classify as a sin.

Whenever this topic comes up I’m at a loss to understand why anyone would waste so much energy mud slinging over some personal language project. It only makes sense if it’s become a hate meme. My pocket word for an event that’s a sort of social singularity. It occurs when enough popular voices have directed the entirety of a community to shame a target based on some perceived wrong, real or otherwise.

Wherever it comes up I’m pretty taken aback by how tribal and ego focused we can be, even among the smartest of us. And that thought isn’t meant be taken as condescending. After all, we’re only human. And for a larger span of human history, that word has meant “hairless ape” more than anything else.

[bheadmaster]

> All that tells me is the creator is overly ambitious for their own good and possibly naive, which I hardly classify as a sin.

Does the fact that he earns money off of Patreon by overpromising all the impossible features change your perspective on the matter?

[dgellow]

They got lot of push back because what the core devs were describing Vlang to be was technically close to impossible, and their implementation was missing lot of properties they were advertising. If you would look at their sources or try out V when they released it you would have seen how outrageous their claims were.

[amedvednikov]

There were no close to impossible/missing features.

[dgellow]

Last time I looked was beginning of 2022, and I read their stdlib implementation and tried the compiler. They advertised their non-GC solution, “auto free”, but it literally didn’t work, your program would just leak. And if you actually look at what they meant by “autofree”, it is a reference counting GC. They advertised Rust memory management ergonomics but without relying on linear types? Their way to do system calls was by running commands in shells.

Unless things changed drastically V lang, as described by their documentation, is a vapor ware.

[amedvednikov]

autofree is not reference counting, and it's marked as "not production ready yet" on the website.

[richbell]

You're saying that when Volt and V were first announced, there were no advertised features that were missing?

[bheadmaster]

What about GC-less autofree?

I'm still waiting for that CS breakthrough to happen - Rust guys will be so mad they spent their time writing lifetime annotations for the borrow checker :)

[amedvednikov]

You can look up vlang.io on web archive and see that it never said GC-less autofree. It actually explicitly said that RC/GC are used for stuff that can't be freed during compile time.

[lvl5hm]

> Is there garbage collection?

March 2019

> No. V's memory management is similar to Rust but much easier to use. More information about it will be posted in the near future.

May 2019

> No. V manages memory at compilation time (like Rust). Right now only basic cases are handled. For others, manual memory management is required for now. The right approach to solve this will be figured out in the near future.

April 2020

> No. V manages memory at compilation, like Rust: vlang.io/docs#memory

August 2023

> You can look up vlang.io on web archive and see that it never said GC-less autofree

[amedvednikov]

Nowhere in your quotes does it say GC-less autofree.

"The right approach to solve this will be figured out in the near future."

And it was figured out, and we now have what we have. It's described on the home page in detail. 4 ways to handle memory.

Why another new account?

[bheadmaster]

Here's a direct quote from the documentation [0] from 2021:

> 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 reference counting.

So most objects are freed by the autofree engine, and the rest are freed via reference counting. This implies that no objects are freed by the GC, which is exactly what I've said.

Please stop gaslighting people.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210315092012/https://github.co...

[amedvednikov]

What's written is correct, what's the issue again?

RC was later replaced with a tracing GC.

RC is a type of GC btw, so...

[bheadmaster]

> If you ask those angered they pull out a list of petty grievances a mile long composed of misleading or highly interpretive wrongs.

> I haven’t had the pleasure to try out V yet

How can you know that the wrongs are misleading if you've never even tried the language?

[richbell]

> If you ask those angered they pull out a list of petty grievances a mile long composed of misleading or highly interpretive wrongs.

What, in your opinion, are legitimate reasons for someone to be upset with V?

[pwdisswordfishc]

> Endless bickering leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Fair enough. But then, you should know false advertising by the language maintainer leaves an even bitterer one.