Comment by isaiahg
2 years ago
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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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.
There were no close to impossible/missing features.
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.
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You're saying that when Volt and V were first announced, there were no advertised features that were missing?
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 :)
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> 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?
> 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?
> 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.
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The homepage still makes the claim that "[autofree] takes care of most objects (~90-100%): the compiler inserts necessary free calls automatically during compilation."
There is no citation for where this 90-100% number comes from, it seems to be pulled completely out of thin air.
Autofree, as it currently exists, cannot handle structs at all, so any program whose memory allocations consist of more than 10% structs unfortunately proves this claim false.
For a specific example, a while ago I wrote a minimax tictactoe program[1] in V, which specifically used a struct to store the board state rather than an array.
In this case, with the minimax running for 4 total moves, valgrind tells me:
So only 93212/161756 allocations were freed, which is 57%.
... Now, I don't actually care that much that autofree doesn't work on structs. I think that's quite reasonable, as it's a very difficult thing to implement!
But, in my opinion, your website should really cite where this 90-100% number comes from, i.e. which benchmarks were used to generate it, so that it is clear that it isn't just completely made up.
(As it currently stands, I would argue this is false advertising specifically because there's no citation for this number!)
[1]: https://pastebin.com/6ZDKKRQR
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> There's no false advertising anywhere on vlang.io or in the docs.
Currently or ever?
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