Comment by lifthrasiir
2 years ago
The "early access" thing makes sense in closed-source projects but not much in F/OSS projects. Now I understand what you meant, but as I've said it was not technically open-sourced for two days and no one would be sure whether you are sincere or not.
This confusion should have been temporary and could have been easily resolved, but your reaction arguably made things worse. For example back then I actually asked you about the exact generic compilation strategy [1], and your answer was unnecessarily aggressive and content-free. It turns out that my later guess (to which you never replied) was right, i.e. the initial V compiler maintained a partial C code template that can be patched. If you had actually answered as such, people would have less reasons to disbelieve you because you have demonstrated a necessary understanding. This was also why other language developers were particularly harsh to you at the beginning.
How was this answer aggressive? The author of Odin claimed I lied that I had json serialization, because it wasn't possible.
I said you don't need AST to generate json serialization code.
What's the drama about?
GingerBill said in his issue (vlang/v#35) that:
> You have previously claimed that the V compiler uses no AST. However, most of the features that you claim would require a form of AST to even work, including generics and interfaces. [...] It's pretty much impossible to not have unless you have a very basic language or doing naïve transformations into another similar language.
You have misinterpreted this as follows:
> Claims like it's not possible to build features without AST or codegen json decoders are just ridiculous.
GingerBill pointed out that you have misread his comments and restated that:
> [...] if you language does not have an AST, which is technically possible, then you cannot have a lot of the features you have been advertising.
This is not saying "impossible". He is claiming that it is possible, but some features will be lacking. I considered this is inaccurate because he was unclear about which features will be affected, so I quantified the original claim as follows and asked you for the confirmation:
> For example, you can implement generics without an AST if you don't care about performance; [...] [T]hose features can be implemented without an AST, but an AST is a standard and reasonable way to do them and not using an AST would require a strong rationale. So what's that rationale? (And amedvednikov, this is my question for you.)
Now, I knew the discussion can often go awry even without bad intents and tried to make it constructive as much as I could. There were many reasonable answers, like "yeah, that's how I did and that makes compilation much faster" or "none of both, the compiler doesn't directly emit binaries". The latter would trigger other questions and at the end everyone could have a much better understanding of what the V compiler actually does.
Instead you replied:
> No you don't understand :) It's IMPOSSIBLE without AST. The Odin creator says so. That's why I'm a liar.
I still don't know why you said that. I even explicitly said that gingerBill has another misconception! You've said that you have no bad feelings to me, and I wish it's true, but this is a typical way to convey that you are angry at me (and gingerBill). "Aggression" generally refers to any action or response that makes someone else unpleasant, and your comment was clearly aggressive to me.
On the other hand, I can see why you have bad feeling about gingerBill. That's another reason I wanted to step in because confirmation bias is pervasive and continuous counterarguments are needed to avoid that---gingerBill initially didn't question your intents. I wanted to make you distracted and not vent your apparent anger by throwing another question, but it didn't work.
For that reason I chose to entirely ignore that paragraph in my reply and asked for the confirmation again, but you never replied back. Others may consider this as another evidence that you were indeed angry at me. I don't, to be explicit, but such an unnecessarily aggressive discourse is often colloquially called a drama.
----
I still can't believe I have to explicitly write this comment, but after multiple interactions I feel it's necessary and hope it helps. It is very hard to effectively communicate only with texts, and I had been there years ago. I only sort-of-learned this after decades of shitposting and fruitless debates. I believe one can learn this without all my hassles.