Comment by _ramj

I joined Vlang GitHub organisation after I was invited. I was aware of the "V for Vaporware" articles [1] that already existed, but at that point they were more than a year old, so things had probably changed. It didn't take long for me to disagree with the way things were moderated, with many negative responses by the moderators to the people with criticism (often valid). I'm talking about moderators calling people "idiots" in the general publicly available chat.

I loved the idea of simplicity, autofree, the UI framework, the browser, Volt app, GitHub alternative, operating system and so much more. But it just didn't seem to go anywhere. The syntax however was simple, I really admired it and by 0.3 they would have a syntax freeze, but I do see that some major syntax has changed after 0.3 multiple times. I left the same day another developer did, and having talked with multiple V developers shortly after, four of them said they agreed to my criticism about moderation and broken promises. Alex (the creator) wrote to me personally, but denied all the criticism which was mentioned in the "V for Vaporware" articles.

In the moderator channel Alex mentioned that autofree wouldn't be delivered in 0.3 and this became my main criticism in the DMs. He could not see why I found it important to notify the community about this, while also telling me to "grow up" for not supporting offensive language, referencing some of the ways Linus Torvalds has written responses.

Shortly thereafter he blocked me privately. It wasn't clear to me if I was blocked though, as Discord just told me I couldn't reach him. So I contacted one of the moderators, who told me that it's due to culture differences.

At one point I even searched in the Discord for messages by Alex that contained "this week", "this month" and "this year", also using "next" instead of "this". It came out to 50+ times that deadlines had been missed (closer to 80+ probably). Even with some major projects such as Gitly from 2019 if I remember correctly, which still isn't done.

[1] https://xeiaso.net/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23/