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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is absurd. It is now a V team's job to continue with, not the other way around. In fact, this kind of outsider perspective is very valuable to growing language communities because it's plain impossible to attain by themselves. As long as the article is not written in a derogatory tone (and I believe not) the OP's job is done by now.
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.
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.
Or maybe it has to do with "never actually used it" after empty platitudes. The article goes to great lengths to show what works as promised or not, you'd expect at least some mention of what the interesting design features are.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really? I didn't catch that vibe at all. You're saying if you do this without involving the community it is trolling? I guess it is fair to run the article by the community somehow, but I'm not sure the best approach to that. I'm doing a similar thing for Nim so I would like to not be seen as trolling.
They call names to anybody who dares to ask a genuine question they don't like. It's a meme by now, how easy it is to get banned on V's discord server.
I've a feeling that author tried to bring these issues on their discord server, got himself banned and then decided to write a blog.
Not sure what you want to test, though I'd bet that if you post questions on forum.nim-lang.org then you will get good help.
Anyway, to maybe get you started, Nim compile speed is usually best with a tcc backend (nim c --cc:tcc or set that in config.nims/nim.cfg). Meanwhile, run-time speed is usually best with gcc PGO.
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.
11 replies →
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.
Ductaped languages usually exist because they served some specific need, become popular and then evolved from there. PHP is the perfect example.
They were not "clean sheet, let's make a great new language" implementations.
1 reply →
Can you list here the extraordinary claims that failed please.
15 replies →
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.
8 replies →
Christine Dodrill's early assessment of the language might be of interest here: https://xeiaso.net/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23
She doesn't pull any punches, but I think she was quite prescient in capturing the vibe of the project.
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.
I'm always interested in new languages and loved your write-up & evaluation of V.
I really don't get the purpose of someone exaggerating the capabilities of their language, to the point of outright lies.
17 replies →
52 replies →
Xe is phasing out that name in favor of "Xe". Xer domain name change was a part of that shift.
Ah I'm sorry, I hadn't checked the website in a little while. I now see there's a redirect and that there is a different name in use.
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...
12 replies →
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.
4 replies →
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.
3 replies →
Yeah you can't buy trust. Once it's done is done.
I'm not touching a language developed by folks who don't see a problem in scamming users, sorry.
2 replies →
> Why in the world do competitors of this programming language insist on dragging out evaluations from 3 years ago...
This question is answered in the comment you just replied to:
> She doesn't pull any punches, but I think she was quite prescient in capturing the vibe of the project.
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.
7 replies →
> Why are so many people frothing at the chance to disparage this language and it's author?
It's because of all the lying. The author keeps claiming that their language has features that it definitely does not have.
Why do so many people consider "I checked several notable claims, and most of them are false" to be some kind of hateful disparaging attack?
15 replies →
Because no other new languages lied that much?
>Things change.
Based on submitted link, they don't.
It's been around for a few years now.
6 replies →
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.
An article like the V one on Zig checking the claims would be awesome, wouldnt it.?
You're welcome to write it yourself.
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:
https://ziglang.org/learn/overview/#performance-and-safety-c...
I think it would be fun and educational!
11 replies →
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).
1 reply →
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.
Where does language like Vala stand? Is it worth checking out?
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)_/¯
Vala hasn't really caught on outside of the GTK world, since it's based on the glib object system.
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.
Do you mean Vale? Vala (the gnome langage) is in an unrelated category.
Vala seemed interesting to me quite a while ago, but V ticks the right boxes.
> 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.
It's just a one line bug in the checker, which can be reported via github, but it wouldn't be as dramatic.
Maybe I misunderstood then. I was saying that it seems to behave basically like Java. Is that a bug?
7 replies →
This is absurd. It is now a V team's job to continue with, not the other way around. In fact, this kind of outsider perspective is very valuable to growing language communities because it's plain impossible to attain by themselves. As long as the article is not written in a derogatory tone (and I believe not) the OP's job is done by now.
It would be very nice if you could do the same thing for Nim.
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.
> 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.
Then I take the liberty of doing some promotion for Oberon+ here too.
4 replies →
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.
Very well, be sure to ask in the IM channels when you need guidance and good luck.
2 replies →
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.
Disclaimer: I’ve never actually used it.
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.
> I thought it would be worth while to attempt a modern evaluation of the language based on where it is today
A good idea indeed, thanks for the effort.
Although I'm quite surprised why V has gained so much attention.
> the design of the language itself (leaving aside the implementation) is genuinely interesting […]
> Disclaimer: I’ve never actually used it.
I can make a hypotethical language as well (I do it all the time), but I wouldn’t make a website about it and give it a name.
New language proposal: W
Features: * All of the things you want * No things that you don't want
Please donate to my Patreon
I agree, the interface has always been great which is what attracts people. The core developer is just overselling and it’s coming back on him
Or maybe it has to do with "never actually used it" after empty platitudes. The article goes to great lengths to show what works as promised or not, you'd expect at least some mention of what the interesting design features are.
2 replies →
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."
https://ocaml.org/docs/functional-programming
> My complaint is that V claims to be pure...
"V is not a purely functional language however." (from V documentation)
https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/doc/docs.md#pure-func...
7 replies →
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.
3 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
I speak English proficiently I speak Chinese with no mistakes I can bend pipes with my bare hands.
Then when you speak to me you hear me speak Chinese well, then you see I can’t bend pipes nor speak English proficiently.
I presented myself to you and two of my self introduction claims were lies or half lies.
If you then feel like I lied to you then my answer is that I’m studying (Alpha)
This is what V was like 3 years ago and doesn’t seem like it has changed.
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.
https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Vlang
I'd be curious to see your AoC solutions in V, if you have them kicking around?
[dead]
Adding a mention that V is still far from 1.0 in the title or at the beginning would have been honest.
V’s Github description from October 2019 would have disagreed
https://web.archive.org/web/20191020121218/https://github.co...
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.
TLDR
> 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.
Quick glance says: This is like the perfect blend of Go and C.
I love it.
Except that unlike C and Go it doesn't work.
Yes, that's the sad part.
What makes you think it doesn't work? An article that listed a couple of type checker bugs?
It is an awesome language. It's the first language I'm feeling will be able to pull me from Ruby once some things get ironed out.
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.
> Since the author has a habit of overpromising and even declaring things finished before even starting on them
Do you have any examples?
21 replies →
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.
2 replies →
> 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.
2 replies →
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).
2 replies →
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.
Cryptocurrencies are also full of ‘passionate’ people. Doesn’t change that it’s all a bigger-fool scam.
Really? I didn't catch that vibe at all. You're saying if you do this without involving the community it is trolling? I guess it is fair to run the article by the community somehow, but I'm not sure the best approach to that. I'm doing a similar thing for Nim so I would like to not be seen as trolling.
They call names to anybody who dares to ask a genuine question they don't like. It's a meme by now, how easy it is to get banned on V's discord server.
I've a feeling that author tried to bring these issues on their discord server, got himself banned and then decided to write a blog.
6 replies →
Not sure what you want to test, though I'd bet that if you post questions on forum.nim-lang.org then you will get good help.
Anyway, to maybe get you started, Nim compile speed is usually best with a tcc backend (nim c --cc:tcc or set that in config.nims/nim.cfg). Meanwhile, run-time speed is usually best with gcc PGO.