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Comment by 0x69420

10 hours ago

victor's legit and people have been excited about his work for years; squashing the history was just a bit of an optics oopsie on his part. the star to fork ratio makes perfect sense for something like bend.

- fstar: 3k stars, 267 forks

- coalton: 1.8k stars, 111 forks

- carp: 6k stars, 267 forks

- c3: 5.8k stars, 400 forks

when something is novel/young (not having had time to grow large and accumulate issues in the vein of "1 doc page out of 1000 is worded incorrectly") and (as of yet) niche (innate barrier to entry for contribution because you have to learn from square 1 what all the moving parts look like), you don't see the same activity patterns on public source hosts as with a general-purpose language.

About forks alone I get it, but look at their issues.

- fstar: 2K issues, stars-issue ratio: 0.6.

- coalton: 700 issues, ratio: 0.4

- carp: 450 issues, ratio: 0.08

- c3: 1.9K issues. ratio: 0.3

Bend has 300 issues for 20K stars so ratio is about 0.02. Maybe their followers starred the repo as a fan activity? It could explain too many stars and too few forks/issues/prs.

  • When the original bend released in 2024 it was mega-hyped, but then interest died off fairly quickly, hence the stars + lack of issues. Now they're re-using the same repo to release the new version.

  • The project got a lot of attention at launch, but it wasn't really ready to be used back then. There were too many limitations, like u24 numbers (yes), 2 GB memory limit, pervasive strictness (if-then-else executed both branches). It was just not practical.I think (hope) that explains a lot of it. But honestly there is also my own failure into making the language actually be used, rather than just a viral moment :( I hope it will be different this time!

  • victor has courted a very llm-enjoyer audience and such people are famously prone to hype (which is kinda brutal in its own way cause the language itself is cool and i dont wanna make it sound like im taking away from that). but yeah, fan activity as you put it easily accounts for the missing order of magnitude, if you like.