Comment by lkey
1 year ago
V's claims have always been dubious on their face. It promised the programming language equivalent of magic with no overhead. I'm glad that someone took the time to print receipts.
The author clearly wants a reckoning, but he's unlikely to receive satisfaction. The people that still use or evangelize V are locked in, the contradictions will only make their belief stronger. Alex is a bullshitter, and arguing with someone like that is pointless.
To top it all off, prominent folks from the V community often engage in flamewars on this exact site. dang has threatened to ban the topic entirely before [1], and honestly at this point I'm pretty supportive of it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37335249
The part when he suggests removing comments in HN is hilarious. Like accepting his rotten behavior as the norm everywhere.
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What's amazing is how large the community became and how strong their love and belief was.
The V devs have promised a lot, have missed a lot but have also achieved a lot. I have written a few short programs in V. IMHO, the V syntax is concise and intuitive and the performance is good. It is lightweight and easy to install and to use. The blog post is probably right that V has many rough edges but I would say the core features in V are well planned. I actually prefer it over some other more popular languages. That said, because V hasn't reached 1.0, it is probably too early to use it in production.
Yeah, when the article skipped over the first two memory management strategies to point out issues with manual memory management and an "automatic" strategy that is unfinished or broken, it really struck me that it's quite impressive for a single author to have a functional, fast language with a working garbage collector and arena allocator (with some issues) in only a few years.
The criticisms in the article, which I just read beginning to end, are largely about features it claims to provide (or claims are in development) that either no other language has, are an improvement on other languages, or are state of the art features in world class languages with hundreds to thousands of times more developer hours.
On the one hand, it's not wrong to criticize the overly ambitious nature of V's plans nor criticize the poor attitude and self-advertising strategies of its lead author. On the other hand, I'm not sure that the article is doing that, it seems much more interested in taking one of these features, showing that it doesn't work, and saying "so there!". But the fact that these are the features being complained about, not the core of the language, says something in itself.
Likewise, the fact that a hobbyist language with a single primary developer has terrible documentation is at the very least par for the course. Heck, I've found the Zig documentation horrific (in the past), and that has way more developer time and mindshare. Compare it to, say, the Oil shell (at least, where it was a few years ago), if you want to be fair.
I'm not convinced that the blog author isn't a troll, in some sense of the word. Clearly, many of their criticisms are well founded. Clearly, Alex does not react well to criticism. Clearly, V kinda sucks for practical use right now in a lot of ways that do matter. But the post (especially the end) feels like an excuse to stir the pot, not well-intentioned criticism. The author seems to want to use this post to counteract people they feel have mistreated them (with some justification).
Note: I say all this as a complete outsider. I've never written a line of V code and probably never will. My only prior experience is that I'm familiar with the controversy around V, especially on this site.
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How do you feel about the basic stuff not working as demonstrated in the article? What's so special about V that you prefer using a literally broken language? (The perma memory leaks are basically enough already to qualify it as broken)
Genuinely curious, I don't understand the point
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The language is worked on by a group of people from around the world, not just Alex. It has to be looked at as a group effort. The total contributor count is at 722, as of today. There is a lot of rhetoric thrown around as criticism or being attributed to the language creator, but it's not anything he actually wrote. So the point of it, where and why, comes across as really strange.
For instance, not understanding why try so hard to push a 2023 review for an old version of the language, when we are in 2024. But ok, here this is. It comes across as not being neutral because of the very personal dispute against V's creator, as revealed at the bottom of the blog. The super strange ranting displayed by the reviewer at the bottom, destroys all sense of neutrality, and disputably its credibility.
The review itself has various errors or problems that people gloss over or haven't caught some of: 1) It's weird to be complaining about autofree, when the documentation says its WIP and go use the GC for now. They clearly are giving user options for managing memory. 2) He was using the wrong or ignoring other compiler options. 3) The reviewer seems to be intentionally distorting or misrepresenting the coroutine situation; it's WIP and will be used on the Windows OS. 4) It's open source. Report to them or go help fix whatever is the issue, as other people have (hundreds of contributors).
For example, with the coroutines part, research (site and documentation) shows the V project will be using both OS threads and green threads for concurrency. Right now, they use OS threads, with the `spawn` and `go` keywords. In the future, the `go` keyword will only be for green threads, which the critic is referring to (corounties). At V's site, they are working on coroutines (green threads) for the Windows OS and are steadily working on implementing that into the language.
I would think most reasonable people would cut a volunteer open source project some slack and allow them time to improve upon what they are doing, but there appears to be some weird rush and other intent going on. Don't see V's community attacking anybody, just them happily focusing on their language, but it seems a lot of people are going after them, really hard.
Is the author better at marketing/sales/promising or programming (delivering)?
Whoa there. It's just a programming language. No need to spill vitriol over that.
I have no skin in the game. Got into V very recently, because it appeals to me at face value.
And in some ways better than other "better C" languages of today.
For me it's just good enough. The syntax is sane, the compiler doesn't want to maniacally ruin my day, the standard library is already quite rich, and finally wrapping C code is a breeze.