Comment by ianthehenry
1 year ago
Can someone explain the backstory of what V is and why someone took the time to write this? To the uninitiated this sounds like someone criticizing some kid’s side project.
I’m picking up some context clues that V is widely used / famous / notable / significant somehow, but the only time I have ever heard of it before this is Xe Iaso’s similarly negative posts. Did V receive some huge funding grant that made it the target of ire? Is the author otherwise well-known? What am I missing?
When the V project started out the creator of V made some big claims that raised a few eyeballs, they've gained a reasonable following over the years, have a pretty serious looking website (https://vlang.io), a beer-money level Patreon following and some corporate partnerships/sponsors. However they have experienced some pretty brutal takedowns over the years, with some of the bolder claims about the language/compiler often being exposed as untrue and some functionality being broken.
A word I keep seeing in relation to V is "aspirational" - the project aspires to be a serious language and it aspires to have some serious features, so I think it's fair to approach it with a more critical eye than one would a kid's side-project. I think HN would have been pretty understanding if they were open about the state of the various features and were a little less defensive when they encounter articles that review it like a Real Language.
If the authors don't want this kind of feedback they can just say front-and-centre (or on their FAQ @ https://github.com/vlang/v/wiki/FAQ) "this is a toy" or "this is pre-alpha" or "this is for research purposes". There are plenty of projects like this which are open about their intent and which don't have posts like this written about them. But I don't think that'll happen, so as it stands the pattern will continue - someone revisits the language every year or so, finds some things that doesn't meet expectations, writes about it and we discuss it on HN again.
There is a summary at the top of this post from 2019:
https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-donating-to-musl-libc-proje...
> To the uninitiated this sounds like someone criticizing some kid’s side project.
As someone uninitiated, you may not appreciate what a devastating burn that is.
We can’t just appreciate that someone took the time to evaluate the technical merits of a particular technology? What the hell does all of this peripheral stuff (“is the author otherwise well-known?”) matter?
"Sounds like someone criticizing some kid’s side project."
That's a really big "kid's side project". Looking at V's GitHub stats:
35.2k Stars
722 Contributors
2.1k Forks