12 ms·

The V Programming Language is open source

180 points by kgraves 7y ago

ksec 7y ago
Maybe it would be better to change the link to [1] ? [1] https://github.com/vlang/v https://github.com/vlang/v
- dang 7y ago
  Normally we would, but this case is a little subtler. The project had a big thread a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632. The issue arose there that the language was not open source yet. Submitting this commit must be a response to that. We mark follow-up posts as dupes unless they contain significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20significant%20new%20information https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). In this case, the significant new information is the open-sourcing, so I think it makes sense to leave up.
  - ksec 7y ago
    Thanks. I wasn't aware of that thread. ( And I was wondering why about the hostility towards it )
SwellJoe 7y ago
It's pretty unclear what its purpose is. The examples look somewhat like go (including something that looks like goroutines, right down to being called with `go`). So, what differentiates V from go, I guess? (Or whatever other language it views itself as competing with, if not go.)
- mpranjic 7y ago
  You can read about differences here: https://vlang.io/compare https://vlang.io/compare
- ksec 7y ago
  Compared to Go, taken from [1] V is very similar to Go, and these are the things it improves upon: - No global state - No null - No undefined values - No err != nil checks (replaced by option types) - Immutability by default - Only one declaration style (a := 0) - Much smaller runtime - Much smaller binaries (a simple web server written in V is 65 KB vs 7 MB in Go) - Zero cost C interop - No GC - Much faster serialization using codegen and no reflection - Precompiled HTML templates unlike html/templates that have to be parsed on every request - Fearless concurrency (no data race guarantee at compilation) - Enums - Generics (in July) - String interpolation: println('$foo: $bar.baz') - Stricter vfmt to ensure one coding style - Centralised package manager [1] https://vlang.io/compare https://vlang.io/compare
  - mhh__ 7y ago
    > No GC How does that improve upon Go? Memory safety is much harder without a GC
    - botto 7y ago
      Isn't it usually game programmers who advise against GC because you can't predict when it will run and the performance impact it will have.
      - mhh__ 7y ago
        Game programmers and also people who seem to think that Garbage Collection involves burning babies and the hundreds of academics and engineers working on it are somehow doing it out of spite. There are reasons not to use a Garbage Collector but 99% of the time they are absolutely fine if you understand what your particular GC does and does not do
    - gbear605 7y ago
      GCs are good for some things and bad for others. I wouldn’t want to write an OS with a GC but I also wouldn’t want to write a web server where I have to manually allocate and free memory. It’s all a trade off.
chubot 7y ago
Hm I looked around the repo, and there doesn't seem to be much there. $ find . -name '*.v'|xargs wc -l|sort -n ... 314 ./glm/glm.v 330 ./time/time.v 338 ./builtin/utf8.v 339 ./examples/tetris/tetris.v 490 ./os/os.v 630 ./compiler/scanner.v 644 ./compiler/table.v 712 ./gg/gg.v 814 ./builtin/string.v 845 ./compiler/main.v 848 ./compiler/fn.v 3216 ./compiler/parser.v 12573 total I'm a big fan of compact code, i.e. doing more with less... but I have been working on langauges for long enough to know that it takes surprisingly large amounts of code to do anything useful in this space. If you discount the lexer and parser, it's like 8-9K lines of code, and it's hard to imagine much being done there. You can make a "toy" in that much code, but the gap to a production compiler is very wide (e.g. a minimum of 50K or 100K lines of code). There is also this translation which is not in the repo: $ wc -l v.c 15099 v.c ---- Also, this bootstrapping part looks pretty slick, except I get a core dump (on Ubuntu 16.04 with default GCC): $ time cc -w -o vc v.c real 0m0.553s user 0m0.517s sys 0m0.035s ~/git/languages/v/compiler$ time ./vc -o v . Segmentation fault (core dumped) real 0m0.095s user 0m0.002s sys 0m0.000s
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- noncoml 7y ago
  Where did you find `v.c`?
  - chubot 7y ago
    URL is in the README wget https://vlang.io/v.c https://vlang.io/v.c
  - krispbyte 7y ago
    Is this v.c file not versioned in the GitHub repository?
- reikonomusha 7y ago
  When I look at the great list of features, then actually look at all of this code written in V, I’m pretty underwhelmed. The code doesn’t look that much different from writing C, except it has more Go-like syntax. The language doesn’t seem to be assisting the writing of code very much, certainly not as much as claimed.
trpc 7y ago
It's amazing that one person can do all this. It really takes a huge amount of dedication, knowledge and high IQ to invent a language from scratch alone. I think he is trying to Rustify Golang which is a thing I always wanted to do before giving up entirely on Golang.
- hollerith 7y ago
  When I saw your "Rustify" I assumed V has a borrow checker, which it turns out not to have. Having immutable variables, no null type and option types is not enough to make a language Rust-like IMO because dozens of languages have those things. ADDED. Now that I know more, I see you have a point: V and Rust are the only 2 languages I know that have immutable variables, no null type, option types and no automatic memory management (i.e., garbage collection): https://vlang.io/docs#memory https://vlang.io/docs#memory
  - amedvednikov 7y ago
    Yes, like https://vlang.io/compare https://vlang.io/compare says, V is somewhere in between Go and Rust.
- amedvednikov 7y ago
  Thanks! :)
ryuukk_ 7y ago
he delivered, where are the haters ? :)
- hiccuphippo 7y ago
  There was a lot of promises. Give people time to test it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- reikonomusha 7y ago
  Not a hater, but what was delivered was a 4K line parser and some wrapper functions over the C standard library. I know the author has said he’s got a lot of TODO work, and the source code says as much, but as a compiler writer myself, the current state of this is maybe a step ahead of an undergrad final project in imperative language implementation. It has some of the buzzwords of languages as of late, like Rust and Go, but it’s quick to see that the stated features are quite shallow (e.g., no participation of an advanced runtime like Go, or an advanced compiler like Rust’s).
- edgeyboy 7y ago
  Now that the release is out, it's actually worse than we expected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251344
  - dang 7y ago
    Can you please follow the admonition at the top? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393
    - edgeyboy 7y ago
      My apologies, I'll be more careful, and more factual.
FpUser 7y ago
I did not have time to really look at it but if at some point they will accomplish everything in their roadmap it will be one heck of a development tool. Love it.
estebank 7y ago
In case the author ever reads this: assuming good faith, the effort and intent is laudable, but you've put the cart in front of the horse by having multiple amazing claims that would take many, many man/years to accomplish by experienced developers, which is why they've been received with a lot of skepticism. Even assuming a great level of skill, the claims a priori are hard to take serious, even before taking into consideration the timeline. Now that (part of?) the code has been released, it seems to be little more than a transpiler from V to C, with allowed inlined C, with most advertised features stubbed out. Had you been claiming "this is my target, very much in progress", then the response to them would be less adversarial and more in the line of "there are multiple reasons all of these targets are not necessarily attainable simultaneously". Had you done that, your Patreon would also likely not have a monthly ~1000 USD support either, which is a big part of why you are in the receiving end of online backlash. I want to imagine that you just got way over your head, underestimating the effort needed to accomplish all of your goals, but at some point it takes a bit of naiveté to think that well-funded teams in other languages haven't tried to fulfill some of your goals before. I'm very much intrigued by the "Space required/Build time" table, particularly how you think the comparison makes sense or is fair in any way, as you're comparing compilers for established languages with extensive standard libraries, implemented and battle tested features and a decades of man/year effort to your solo project. Looking at the project it is really hard to come away with an opinion that isn't one of "this is a joke", "this is fraudulent" or "this is a well intentioned inexperienced developer that has no idea how high the target they've set for themselves is". I hope that if it is the latter.
- high_derivative 7y ago
  Would you have some links to the backlash? Where are these discussions on his language taking place?
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    On Reddit and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632
  - estebank 7y ago
edgeyboy 7y ago
After going through the source code, I can tell for sure that it's an insecure C transpiler. - Most things call just out to C. - A lot of examples don't even compile. - Some things use CLI curl or mkdir, this is /INCREDIBLY/ insecure. - Many things are unimplemented. - Dev banned me off org when I opened issues about these and deleted issues. I was unnecessarily rude on some which I apologize for, but deleting them and calling me a troll was uncalled for. I wrote about them here: https://twitter.com/boy_edgey/status/1142504580074344448 https://twitter.com/boy_edgey/status/1142504580074344448 (thread)
- tasty_freeze 7y ago
  I have to agree from the snippets of your reports, the tone of those reports were needlessly antagonistic and superior. Starting a report with "You idiot" or "Oh god this is a fucking goldmine" should get you banned, even if the issue you are reporting is real. Such reports aren't trying to contribute to the project; they are trying to boost the reporter.
  - edgeyboy 7y ago
    I didn't ever say "Oh god this is a fucking goldmine". That was a reply.
- SolarNet 7y ago
  Well you were calling him an idiot in the issues and being overall aggressive. I would ban you too (but I'd keep the issues after some editing).
  - edgeyboy 7y ago
    I apologize for criticizing the person and not the project, but again, the fact that he deleted the issues is unreasonable.
    - drusepth 7y ago
      I, too, would delete needlessly aggressive issues on my open source projects if I didn't end up editing them to make them actually usable. Either way, it'd definitely be a ban so the user wouldn't edit them back or escalate with more aggression in other issues.
endymi0n 7y ago
Despite the immense neophobia of Hacker News, I'll jump forward and say I think there's a lot to love around vlang. Go is an amazing language and my go-to language for most backend tasks these days, but often when jumping back from Python, it feels needlessly cumbersome. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about any "magic", Go is exactly as great as it is, because it's so simple and barebones. I'm talking about some basic comfort that costs mental energy but zero complexity or execution speed. The things the Rust community calls "zero cost abstractions". But the core language developers seem to be pretty opinioated and _of course_ a set can be logically thought as just a map of empty structs, so you don't need two concepts in a language. But it's something I have to teach to every developer starting out. And although Rust gets a lot of things right, it's too complex for my choice. The performance/simplicity ratio of Go is just right, so that's what makes me hopeful about V. Vlang introduces so many concepts I just would have loved in Go. Native Enums. Immutability by default. In operators. The list goes on and on and on. At this point, it's absolutely overpromised and pretty much unusable without a stdlib, an ecosystem and GC. But my best case scenario would be the CoffeeScript case. A language that so beautifully covers another major language's warts, that it drives the major improvements back to the origin. Go 2 devs, please listen. 90% of the ideas in V are pure gold.
- reikonomusha 7y ago
  I didn’t see any immutable data structures in V. I just saw disallowing assignment of variables. But I can still assign an object which itself is mutable, and mutate that elsewhere.
- ilovecaching 7y ago
  That's the point of the project. It promises a very buzzwordy professional grade language to rival other languages built by full time teams of engineers. Of course it sounds like gold - unfortunately this is fools gold. We shouldn't be promoting projects like this that are raking in more money than genuinely useful in production open source projects by people who are too modest to hawk Patreons. I'm all for toy projects and beginners writing their first langauge. I object to inflating a project well beyond what the author knows they can deliver while collecting money from people who are hopeful that the project isn't a joke. This is an example of how to take a passion project in the wrong direction. Open source from the beginning, be open with your intentions, don't over promise, don't accept money until you have something of value people can use, don't flame people who are critiquing you when listening to advice could make your project better.
dang 7y ago
This is a follow-up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632, which explains why the submission links to a particular commit. That discussion was one of the weirdest flamewars we've had on HN, complete with an unseemly fight between programming language designers. If you're going to comment in this one, please follow the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and take care not to repeat what happened there. Remain scrupulously respectful, regardless of how wrong you think someone else is or of how you feel about something. Then your points will be more convincing, and you'll be helping to sustain the community rather than harming it.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
tluyben2 7y ago
I knew nothing about this project until I saw rants here and on reddit the past week about it. I think many of us have been here; in my opinion (which is just an opinion) this guy got in over his head like we all did when we had limited experience in doing a particular project. I have often thought that I could finish a momentum task in x weeks because in my head it really was a few 100 simple tasks and that was it. In reality ofcourse, it turns out to be a 1000 of simple and not so simple tasks, many of which actually were not very simple. And more importantly; I had never done them before. That is not malice, it is just inexperience and this guy really looks inexperienced because he knew this would not hold up when he was pressured to release the source. Keeping optimistic and thinking that he is further than he is even though it is quite provable that he is not, is also a symptom of this programmers disease. It is related, I think, to the 80/20 rule which fresher programmers do not even want to admit to; this is even more extreem as the 80% has not been reached yet, but the author thinks he is actually past the 80%. I could be wrong and it could be malice, but reading his responses and everything I read the past days about this, I would say it's the same as what I had when I was a teenager going with my father to where he worked and claiming that there must be something wrong because why did it take so long to program these computers while I could 'write code really fast'. 30 years later I still can 'write code really fast' but I know that has not much to do with finishing a project (in time or at all). It is insane what he set out to do really; write a language to write a moving project in, including docs and examples etc. For me, if he would've been more realistic about the deliveries/timelines (just take a few years man!), I would've actually sponsored him and if he turns out to not be a fraud I still might. We have not so many people who dream big; we do need results though... Edit: I described the Dunning-Kruger effect; forgot the name. I grew over it by getting more experience (I got into some pretty hairy and complex projects when I hit 18 and that taught me that reality really is very complex).
sesteel 7y ago
If this project was trying to prove there is a space for a language with the features as described, it was a success. Many people want a magical compiler that has simple syntax, no calling overhead to C, and automatic memory management without the overhead of a garbage collector, etc. I really feel this is an indictment of both Rust, for its approachability, and Go, for its lack of common features. I love and use both languages but it has been difficult for me to get other developers to want to use either for anything more than a utility.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  There is a problem space and a solution space of programming languages. We all love to have a language is performant and expressive and maintainable simultaneously, and that is a problem description. We have no definitive answer how to achieve that though. We haven't explicitly ruled out that it is plain impossible, but it is evident that no single person is likely to deliver such a language.
- Blaisorblade0 7y ago
  > automatic memory management without the overhead of a garbage collector I’d also love magic, but you can’t just wish it into existence. That’s a hard problem that V doesn’t solve yet. One should be open minded, but what’s the evidence V can solve this? TLDR: not very compelling; just examples of existing techniques, and wild promises. What docs show(fn1), and doesn’t even work according to reports, is an easy example of an existing technique — escape analysis, something that JVMs implement. It’s also hard enough to do properly, and it’s taken pretty long for HotSpot to handle some trickier cases. I also wonder how you’d implement the hard cases without an AST. And there’s no citation to the scientific literature, so you could fear the author just figured the basic idea, and thought the rest was easy. But escape analysis can’t handle everything, so usually you need a GC. Nobody knows how to avoid that, a solution would be novel research. So, what does V bring to the table? > For more complex cases manual memory management is required. This will be fixed soon. Ah, so you’ll just “fix soon” an open research problem? Wow. Not very compelling. Also: > V will detect memory leaks at runtime and report them. But... if you could avoid manual management, wouldn’t leak be impossible? So why would you do both? Unless you want to report the leaks that automated memory management doesn’t fix — memory that is reachable but never going to be used. But never seen anything good at detecting those leaks. Also, wouldn’t you you need (an optional) GC or refcounting to do even that basic reporting? Sure you can, but doesn’t that add to the implementation complexity? fn1: https://vlang.io/docs#memory https://vlang.io/docs#memory
high_derivative 7y ago
So without having followed the story, some thoughts on designing large frameworks, where a programming language is possibly the among the most ambitious because design choices are so consequential. In my iterations of learning to do this (in the open source machine learning space), there have been always five phases: i) Ingest - use existing tools for years, try to build things and understand the subtleties of their limitations. ii) Build something - if you were right about the limitations and identify ways to overcome them, people will recognize that and want to use what you build. iii) Maintain and learn how your assumptions live up to user realities. iv) Realize very likely that your first attempt at greatness wasn't all that yet, even if it becomes popular. Popularity is not a sign of what you building being well designed, just that the need for it may be great. v) Build something based on the combination of your initial hunches and taste which got you into it to begin with, and your experience on building something large. Iterate, and given enough talent and sweat, you might create something that is just right. Being a computer scientist but not a programming language geek and looking at this, the project looks like a first attempt at ii), but is selling itself as a late iteration of v). Tech communities have very high standards and taste on design, so overselling is deadly.
SolarNet 7y ago
Coming from an outside reference frame (I have zero knowledge of the - obviously contentious - backstory, and I am holding off on reading that backstory until I review this language on it's merits). On my examination it looks like a very interesting transpiler. I suspect that like most languages it will bloat as it attempts to achieve it's goals, especially with the size of the standard library that is going to be included by implication. However if it's goal was to be a useful C transpiler for the modern age I would be more excited, and more interested. Things like hot reloading, easy to use REST access, nice syntax, and the ability to fall back to C are all nice features. For a certain class of application (notably the author's Volt application, and video games) this would be very useful. I would warn the author of throwing away what they have for going down the rabbit hole of language implementation. It is nowhere as simple as they seem to imagine. An anecdotal story, when using LLVM one will regularly come across required parameters that seem like they should be optional and don't seem important. And yet once one starts thinking about compatibility, errors, ABIs, they realize there are hundreds of edgecases that must be accounted for. For example structure returns on the windows ABI change the ordering of function call arguments depending on the size of the structure, and additionally require redundant memory operations (and failing to do both will cause your compiler to work for some libraries but not others).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
amedvednikov 7y ago
Hello, Developer here. The release was messed up by me having serious git troubles. I had to destroy the repository twice, as the result and old README file with the wrong instructions resulted in everyone having segfaults. Everything will work as expected in a couple of days. Launching such a big project for hundreds (thousands?) of testers is not easy.
- sfilargi 7y ago
  It’s just a toy project my friend. Stop marketing it as something extraordinary.
- faiface 7y ago
  So, what are the correct instructions? I followed the instructions on the GitHub and yes, I'm getting segfaults.
  - amedvednikov 7y ago
    can you `wget https://vlang.io/v.c` https://vlang.io/v.c` again?
    - faiface 7y ago
      Okay, I did and I was able to compile the `vc` compiler from the C source. The REPL in `vc` seems to work (at least for the basic printing I tried) and running `./vc -o v .` worked as well. But the new `v` compiler segfaults with: coudlnt create file "/var/tmp/vlang0.0.12//vrepl.v" Segmentation fault (core dumped) EDIT: however, if I understand it correctly, it was not the instructions after all, that resulted in everyone having segfaults... EDIT2: okay, so I redownloaded the whole thing and yes, you fixed that now. But it still segfaults sometimes. For example if I try to pass a `-h` flag.
      - amedvednikov 7y ago
        You had to do `git pull` to fix the "V" V binary :) Forgot to mention that, sorry. It's going to be much, much more stable in the coming days.
AndyKelley 7y ago
Dan, it seems like you're referring to me, and I don't appreciate this food fight characterization. In society it is the duty of everyone to call out scam artists to protect each other and that's exactly what happened in that thread. At the time, it was a scam, since the author was collecting money from people on false claims. Respect is not only contained in tone of voice, but also in how honest one chooses to be. However, since then, two things have happened: 1. The source has been provided. 2. The website has been updated to note which features are unavailable. So, this is now my position which I have stated elsewhere: > Now that the website has the "WIP" label to communicate which features are not available, and the source is released, I no longer consider this project to be fraudulent. The information is available to everyone, and people who donate on Patreon are making an informed choice. > I'm genuinely glad it turned out this way. Good luck on your endeavor, and welcome to the programming languages club.
- sfilargi 7y ago
  I think you are being a bit more than generous here. What this revealed to be is a bit more than a university Computer Languages assignment. A toy project if you want.
- dang 7y ago
  Not only you! and fair enough, I've removed food from my comment above. The previous thread was still an unseemly flamewar, with gratuitous drama of the sort we definitely don't need on HN. It caused a universal WTF among the HN staff. I gather that in some cases this drama was being imported from internet rumbles elsewhere. Those need to stay elsewhere, and people here need to follow HN's guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Calling someone else a scam artist and their work a fraud is an example of this and is obviously not respectful, however honest it may be. Moreover, if you begin by turning the knobs up to 11 ("This guy is a complete fraud"), there's nowhere else left to go, which explains why the discussion after that was so lousy—not that it excuses any other commenter. I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393 and marked it off-topic. Edit: in case it isn't clear, I'm not taking a side about the technical issues. I haven't looked closely at them (or at all), and these points about the site guidelines hold even if one side was 100% right and the other 100% wrong, or vice versa.
fogottenuser02 7y ago
This was supposed to be originally posted on Dang's post. Evidently, criticizing the mob-boss isn't allowed now. AndyKelley never ever forget why Ycombinator runs a "news" site. YCombinator is a propaganda and VC funnel for upcoming projects that might make them money. The convenient excuses of tone policing is to not scare away upcoming companies and orgs that might be reprehensible to the public, but fit into the idea of (0) Moloch. The SEC only requires significant transparency to Public corporations, which YC doesn't primarily work with. So, they can be as opaque and 'fake news'-ish as they wish. And they do, via "Hacker News". HN/dang has removed and/or modified and/of split off threads to lessen the impact of projects that affect them. And my guess is that V is one of those projects that caught their eye. Instead, you'll see dang and similar giving edicts from above dismissing and ignoring legitimate complaints. Why? It all boils down to money. And YC wants more. Is that really surprising? Now, why aren't I posting under my usual username? Because bans, hellbans, and other 'bad user' flags are a thing. And YC would never approach such transparency. They won't even try for the GDPR, and that's saying something. (0) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ ------------------------------------------- (My response, since you flagged it: If we listened to anything you've taught us, you don't do something you're good at for free. So, why do you run a news site? It's certainly not out of the goodness of your heart. My not-so-dark-idea is it benefits Ycombinator in a significant way. )
- dang 7y ago
  I'd happily respond, but this comment is like a greased pig: there's nothing to latch onto. Well, there's one thing: nothing about that project affects YC or HN or us, and we haven't conspired to "lessen the impact". The sinister specifics people come up with! What catches my eye is flamewars on Hacker News, because part of being a janitor is mopping those up. Our deep dark purpose? To have an internet forum that doesn't suck. Unless you have plumbed my unconscious and know my thoughts better than I do, that's all we're trying to achieve. That alone is plenty valuable, so it's all we need to optimize for. p.s. Nobody flagged your reply. It got caught in a software filter, and moderators unkilled it, as we often do.
  - 7y ago
withoutboats 7y ago
It's pretty obvious that this person has essentially lied: they have not implemented the complex features they claim while they hype benefits like compile time and lack of non-zero cost features that will have to disappear when they have implemented what they promised. But I think what's more interesting, more telling, is the level of vitriol over 12k/year in patreon subscriptions. Funding in open source is so absurdly unequal that people are outraged over someone earning table scraps. EDIT: No idea why this was flagged, I don't understand the norms of this strange website.
- staticassertion 7y ago
  The only thing developers seem to hate more than closed source software is a funded open source project.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    Not in general, but many open source developers do hard work and do sometimes not even get praise, so they don't like it when someone who they feel did not work so hard or not at all and just promised unrealistic things, get's the money. (not judging about that case here)
    - staticassertion 7y ago
      This sounds to me like that same attitude that keeps people from saying how much they make; that your coworker will get mad at you, and not your boss.
      - hutzlibu 7y ago
        A bit, yes. Except in cases where people make money from a limited avaiable fund, by lying.
        staticassertion 7y ago
        "limited available fund" ah yes, the software industry really does barely manage to scrape by, good point.
13415 7y ago
The name is good, the language has very cool features on the roadmap. I'd find it interesting even if it was just a concept with no implementation at all, so I don't get what people complain about it. Where do all these naysayers come from? Do they hold personal grudges? If it included an optional GC, version 1.0 of V would probably be my favorite language and I'll definitely follow its future development.
mises 7y ago
Wow, did dang really remove all the replies to his comment? Here's what it looked like a few hours ago; it was still open in my browser. https://u.teknik.io/pD724.png https://u.teknik.io/pD724.png Those comments were generally respectful; I saw no reason to remove them. Seems over-zealous to get rid of any disagreement with a moderator's decision.
- edflsafoiewq 7y ago
  No, the subthread was just detached and marked off topic. Scroll down a bit more to find it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251706. This is a common moderator action on HN.
  - mises 7y ago
    Maybe it would be better for him to amend to his comment that "further discussion on this comment has been moved to here:"
    - dang 7y ago
      We might eventually change the software to provide links to things like previous children and previous parents, for those who like to follow these things. But it isn't clear to me how to do it without complicating the UI, which would be a cost that exceeds the benefit.
phrmoy 7y ago
Go V! (no pun intended).
lkjasdfmls 7y ago
I'm always excited to see updates on V

180 points by kgraves 7y ago

ksec 7y ago

Maybe it would be better to change the link to [1] ? [1] https://github.com/vlang/v https://github.com/vlang/v

dang 7y ago
Normally we would, but this case is a little subtler. The project had a big thread a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632. The issue arose there that the language was not open source yet. Submitting this commit must be a response to that. We mark follow-up posts as dupes unless they contain significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20significant%20new%20information https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). In this case, the significant new information is the open-sourcing, so I think it makes sense to leave up.
- ksec 7y ago
  Thanks. I wasn't aware of that thread. ( And I was wondering why about the hostility towards it )

SwellJoe 7y ago

It's pretty unclear what its purpose is. The examples look somewhat like go (including something that looks like goroutines, right down to being called with `go`). So, what differentiates V from go, I guess? (Or whatever other language it views itself as competing with, if not go.)

mpranjic 7y ago
You can read about differences here: https://vlang.io/compare https://vlang.io/compare
ksec 7y ago
Compared to Go, taken from [1] V is very similar to Go, and these are the things it improves upon: - No global state - No null - No undefined values - No err != nil checks (replaced by option types) - Immutability by default - Only one declaration style (a := 0) - Much smaller runtime - Much smaller binaries (a simple web server written in V is 65 KB vs 7 MB in Go) - Zero cost C interop - No GC - Much faster serialization using codegen and no reflection - Precompiled HTML templates unlike html/templates that have to be parsed on every request - Fearless concurrency (no data race guarantee at compilation) - Enums - Generics (in July) - String interpolation: println('$foo: $bar.baz') - Stricter vfmt to ensure one coding style - Centralised package manager [1] https://vlang.io/compare https://vlang.io/compare
- mhh__ 7y ago
  > No GC How does that improve upon Go? Memory safety is much harder without a GC
  - botto 7y ago
    Isn't it usually game programmers who advise against GC because you can't predict when it will run and the performance impact it will have.
    - mhh__ 7y ago
      Game programmers and also people who seem to think that Garbage Collection involves burning babies and the hundreds of academics and engineers working on it are somehow doing it out of spite. There are reasons not to use a Garbage Collector but 99% of the time they are absolutely fine if you understand what your particular GC does and does not do
  - gbear605 7y ago
    GCs are good for some things and bad for others. I wouldn’t want to write an OS with a GC but I also wouldn’t want to write a web server where I have to manually allocate and free memory. It’s all a trade off.

chubot 7y ago

Hm I looked around the repo, and there doesn't seem to be much there. $ find . -name '*.v'|xargs wc -l|sort -n ... 314 ./glm/glm.v 330 ./time/time.v 338 ./builtin/utf8.v 339 ./examples/tetris/tetris.v 490 ./os/os.v 630 ./compiler/scanner.v 644 ./compiler/table.v 712 ./gg/gg.v 814 ./builtin/string.v 845 ./compiler/main.v 848 ./compiler/fn.v 3216 ./compiler/parser.v 12573 total I'm a big fan of compact code, i.e. doing more with less... but I have been working on langauges for long enough to know that it takes surprisingly large amounts of code to do anything useful in this space. If you discount the lexer and parser, it's like 8-9K lines of code, and it's hard to imagine much being done there. You can make a "toy" in that much code, but the gap to a production compiler is very wide (e.g. a minimum of 50K or 100K lines of code). There is also this translation which is not in the repo: $ wc -l v.c 15099 v.c ---- Also, this bootstrapping part looks pretty slick, except I get a core dump (on Ubuntu 16.04 with default GCC): $ time cc -w -o vc v.c real 0m0.553s user 0m0.517s sys 0m0.035s ~/git/languages/v/compiler$ time ./vc -o v . Segmentation fault (core dumped) real 0m0.095s user 0m0.002s sys 0m0.000s

deleted 7y ago
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noncoml 7y ago
Where did you find `v.c`?
- chubot 7y ago
  URL is in the README wget https://vlang.io/v.c https://vlang.io/v.c
- krispbyte 7y ago
  Is this v.c file not versioned in the GitHub repository?
reikonomusha 7y ago
When I look at the great list of features, then actually look at all of this code written in V, I’m pretty underwhelmed. The code doesn’t look that much different from writing C, except it has more Go-like syntax. The language doesn’t seem to be assisting the writing of code very much, certainly not as much as claimed.

trpc 7y ago

It's amazing that one person can do all this. It really takes a huge amount of dedication, knowledge and high IQ to invent a language from scratch alone. I think he is trying to Rustify Golang which is a thing I always wanted to do before giving up entirely on Golang.

hollerith 7y ago
When I saw your "Rustify" I assumed V has a borrow checker, which it turns out not to have. Having immutable variables, no null type and option types is not enough to make a language Rust-like IMO because dozens of languages have those things. ADDED. Now that I know more, I see you have a point: V and Rust are the only 2 languages I know that have immutable variables, no null type, option types and no automatic memory management (i.e., garbage collection): https://vlang.io/docs#memory https://vlang.io/docs#memory
- amedvednikov 7y ago
  Yes, like https://vlang.io/compare https://vlang.io/compare says, V is somewhere in between Go and Rust.
amedvednikov 7y ago
Thanks! :)

ryuukk_ 7y ago

he delivered, where are the haters ? :)

hiccuphippo 7y ago
There was a lot of promises. Give people time to test it.
deleted 7y ago
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reikonomusha 7y ago
Not a hater, but what was delivered was a 4K line parser and some wrapper functions over the C standard library. I know the author has said he’s got a lot of TODO work, and the source code says as much, but as a compiler writer myself, the current state of this is maybe a step ahead of an undergrad final project in imperative language implementation. It has some of the buzzwords of languages as of late, like Rust and Go, but it’s quick to see that the stated features are quite shallow (e.g., no participation of an advanced runtime like Go, or an advanced compiler like Rust’s).
edgeyboy 7y ago
Now that the release is out, it's actually worse than we expected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251344
- dang 7y ago
  Can you please follow the admonition at the top? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393
  - edgeyboy 7y ago
    My apologies, I'll be more careful, and more factual.

FpUser 7y ago

I did not have time to really look at it but if at some point they will accomplish everything in their roadmap it will be one heck of a development tool. Love it.

estebank 7y ago

In case the author ever reads this: assuming good faith, the effort and intent is laudable, but you've put the cart in front of the horse by having multiple amazing claims that would take many, many man/years to accomplish by experienced developers, which is why they've been received with a lot of skepticism. Even assuming a great level of skill, the claims a priori are hard to take serious, even before taking into consideration the timeline. Now that (part of?) the code has been released, it seems to be little more than a transpiler from V to C, with allowed inlined C, with most advertised features stubbed out. Had you been claiming "this is my target, very much in progress", then the response to them would be less adversarial and more in the line of "there are multiple reasons all of these targets are not necessarily attainable simultaneously". Had you done that, your Patreon would also likely not have a monthly ~1000 USD support either, which is a big part of why you are in the receiving end of online backlash. I want to imagine that you just got way over your head, underestimating the effort needed to accomplish all of your goals, but at some point it takes a bit of naiveté to think that well-funded teams in other languages haven't tried to fulfill some of your goals before. I'm very much intrigued by the "Space required/Build time" table, particularly how you think the comparison makes sense or is fair in any way, as you're comparing compilers for established languages with extensive standard libraries, implemented and battle tested features and a decades of man/year effort to your solo project. Looking at the project it is really hard to come away with an opinion that isn't one of "this is a joke", "this is fraudulent" or "this is a well intentioned inexperienced developer that has no idea how high the target they've set for themselves is". I hope that if it is the latter.

high_derivative 7y ago
Would you have some links to the backlash? Where are these discussions on his language taking place?
- tluyben2 7y ago
  On Reddit and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632
- estebank 7y ago

edgeyboy 7y ago

After going through the source code, I can tell for sure that it's an insecure C transpiler. - Most things call just out to C. - A lot of examples don't even compile. - Some things use CLI curl or mkdir, this is /INCREDIBLY/ insecure. - Many things are unimplemented. - Dev banned me off org when I opened issues about these and deleted issues. I was unnecessarily rude on some which I apologize for, but deleting them and calling me a troll was uncalled for. I wrote about them here: https://twitter.com/boy_edgey/status/1142504580074344448 https://twitter.com/boy_edgey/status/1142504580074344448 (thread)

tasty_freeze 7y ago
I have to agree from the snippets of your reports, the tone of those reports were needlessly antagonistic and superior. Starting a report with "You idiot" or "Oh god this is a fucking goldmine" should get you banned, even if the issue you are reporting is real. Such reports aren't trying to contribute to the project; they are trying to boost the reporter.
- edgeyboy 7y ago
  I didn't ever say "Oh god this is a fucking goldmine". That was a reply.
SolarNet 7y ago
Well you were calling him an idiot in the issues and being overall aggressive. I would ban you too (but I'd keep the issues after some editing).
- edgeyboy 7y ago
  I apologize for criticizing the person and not the project, but again, the fact that he deleted the issues is unreasonable.
  - drusepth 7y ago
    I, too, would delete needlessly aggressive issues on my open source projects if I didn't end up editing them to make them actually usable. Either way, it'd definitely be a ban so the user wouldn't edit them back or escalate with more aggression in other issues.

endymi0n 7y ago

Despite the immense neophobia of Hacker News, I'll jump forward and say I think there's a lot to love around vlang. Go is an amazing language and my go-to language for most backend tasks these days, but often when jumping back from Python, it feels needlessly cumbersome. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about any "magic", Go is exactly as great as it is, because it's so simple and barebones. I'm talking about some basic comfort that costs mental energy but zero complexity or execution speed. The things the Rust community calls "zero cost abstractions". But the core language developers seem to be pretty opinioated and _of course_ a set can be logically thought as just a map of empty structs, so you don't need two concepts in a language. But it's something I have to teach to every developer starting out. And although Rust gets a lot of things right, it's too complex for my choice. The performance/simplicity ratio of Go is just right, so that's what makes me hopeful about V. Vlang introduces so many concepts I just would have loved in Go. Native Enums. Immutability by default. In operators. The list goes on and on and on. At this point, it's absolutely overpromised and pretty much unusable without a stdlib, an ecosystem and GC. But my best case scenario would be the CoffeeScript case. A language that so beautifully covers another major language's warts, that it drives the major improvements back to the origin. Go 2 devs, please listen. 90% of the ideas in V are pure gold.

reikonomusha 7y ago
I didn’t see any immutable data structures in V. I just saw disallowing assignment of variables. But I can still assign an object which itself is mutable, and mutate that elsewhere.
ilovecaching 7y ago
That's the point of the project. It promises a very buzzwordy professional grade language to rival other languages built by full time teams of engineers. Of course it sounds like gold - unfortunately this is fools gold. We shouldn't be promoting projects like this that are raking in more money than genuinely useful in production open source projects by people who are too modest to hawk Patreons. I'm all for toy projects and beginners writing their first langauge. I object to inflating a project well beyond what the author knows they can deliver while collecting money from people who are hopeful that the project isn't a joke. This is an example of how to take a passion project in the wrong direction. Open source from the beginning, be open with your intentions, don't over promise, don't accept money until you have something of value people can use, don't flame people who are critiquing you when listening to advice could make your project better.

dang 7y ago

This is a follow-up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229632, which explains why the submission links to a particular commit. That discussion was one of the weirdest flamewars we've had on HN, complete with an unseemly fight between programming language designers. If you're going to comment in this one, please follow the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and take care not to repeat what happened there. Remain scrupulously respectful, regardless of how wrong you think someone else is or of how you feel about something. Then your points will be more convincing, and you'll be helping to sustain the community rather than harming it.

deleted 10mo ago
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tluyben2 7y ago

I knew nothing about this project until I saw rants here and on reddit the past week about it. I think many of us have been here; in my opinion (which is just an opinion) this guy got in over his head like we all did when we had limited experience in doing a particular project. I have often thought that I could finish a momentum task in x weeks because in my head it really was a few 100 simple tasks and that was it. In reality ofcourse, it turns out to be a 1000 of simple and not so simple tasks, many of which actually were not very simple. And more importantly; I had never done them before. That is not malice, it is just inexperience and this guy really looks inexperienced because he knew this would not hold up when he was pressured to release the source. Keeping optimistic and thinking that he is further than he is even though it is quite provable that he is not, is also a symptom of this programmers disease. It is related, I think, to the 80/20 rule which fresher programmers do not even want to admit to; this is even more extreem as the 80% has not been reached yet, but the author thinks he is actually past the 80%. I could be wrong and it could be malice, but reading his responses and everything I read the past days about this, I would say it's the same as what I had when I was a teenager going with my father to where he worked and claiming that there must be something wrong because why did it take so long to program these computers while I could 'write code really fast'. 30 years later I still can 'write code really fast' but I know that has not much to do with finishing a project (in time or at all). It is insane what he set out to do really; write a language to write a moving project in, including docs and examples etc. For me, if he would've been more realistic about the deliveries/timelines (just take a few years man!), I would've actually sponsored him and if he turns out to not be a fraud I still might. We have not so many people who dream big; we do need results though... Edit: I described the Dunning-Kruger effect; forgot the name. I grew over it by getting more experience (I got into some pretty hairy and complex projects when I hit 18 and that taught me that reality really is very complex).

sesteel 7y ago

If this project was trying to prove there is a space for a language with the features as described, it was a success. Many people want a magical compiler that has simple syntax, no calling overhead to C, and automatic memory management without the overhead of a garbage collector, etc. I really feel this is an indictment of both Rust, for its approachability, and Go, for its lack of common features. I love and use both languages but it has been difficult for me to get other developers to want to use either for anything more than a utility.

lifthrasiir 7y ago
There is a problem space and a solution space of programming languages. We all love to have a language is performant and expressive and maintainable simultaneously, and that is a problem description. We have no definitive answer how to achieve that though. We haven't explicitly ruled out that it is plain impossible, but it is evident that no single person is likely to deliver such a language.
Blaisorblade0 7y ago
> automatic memory management without the overhead of a garbage collector I’d also love magic, but you can’t just wish it into existence. That’s a hard problem that V doesn’t solve yet. One should be open minded, but what’s the evidence V can solve this? TLDR: not very compelling; just examples of existing techniques, and wild promises. What docs show(fn1), and doesn’t even work according to reports, is an easy example of an existing technique — escape analysis, something that JVMs implement. It’s also hard enough to do properly, and it’s taken pretty long for HotSpot to handle some trickier cases. I also wonder how you’d implement the hard cases without an AST. And there’s no citation to the scientific literature, so you could fear the author just figured the basic idea, and thought the rest was easy. But escape analysis can’t handle everything, so usually you need a GC. Nobody knows how to avoid that, a solution would be novel research. So, what does V bring to the table? > For more complex cases manual memory management is required. This will be fixed soon. Ah, so you’ll just “fix soon” an open research problem? Wow. Not very compelling. Also: > V will detect memory leaks at runtime and report them. But... if you could avoid manual management, wouldn’t leak be impossible? So why would you do both? Unless you want to report the leaks that automated memory management doesn’t fix — memory that is reachable but never going to be used. But never seen anything good at detecting those leaks. Also, wouldn’t you you need (an optional) GC or refcounting to do even that basic reporting? Sure you can, but doesn’t that add to the implementation complexity? fn1: https://vlang.io/docs#memory https://vlang.io/docs#memory

high_derivative 7y ago

So without having followed the story, some thoughts on designing large frameworks, where a programming language is possibly the among the most ambitious because design choices are so consequential. In my iterations of learning to do this (in the open source machine learning space), there have been always five phases: i) Ingest - use existing tools for years, try to build things and understand the subtleties of their limitations. ii) Build something - if you were right about the limitations and identify ways to overcome them, people will recognize that and want to use what you build. iii) Maintain and learn how your assumptions live up to user realities. iv) Realize very likely that your first attempt at greatness wasn't all that yet, even if it becomes popular. Popularity is not a sign of what you building being well designed, just that the need for it may be great. v) Build something based on the combination of your initial hunches and taste which got you into it to begin with, and your experience on building something large. Iterate, and given enough talent and sweat, you might create something that is just right. Being a computer scientist but not a programming language geek and looking at this, the project looks like a first attempt at ii), but is selling itself as a late iteration of v). Tech communities have very high standards and taste on design, so overselling is deadly.

SolarNet 7y ago

Coming from an outside reference frame (I have zero knowledge of the - obviously contentious - backstory, and I am holding off on reading that backstory until I review this language on it's merits). On my examination it looks like a very interesting transpiler. I suspect that like most languages it will bloat as it attempts to achieve it's goals, especially with the size of the standard library that is going to be included by implication. However if it's goal was to be a useful C transpiler for the modern age I would be more excited, and more interested. Things like hot reloading, easy to use REST access, nice syntax, and the ability to fall back to C are all nice features. For a certain class of application (notably the author's Volt application, and video games) this would be very useful. I would warn the author of throwing away what they have for going down the rabbit hole of language implementation. It is nowhere as simple as they seem to imagine. An anecdotal story, when using LLVM one will regularly come across required parameters that seem like they should be optional and don't seem important. And yet once one starts thinking about compatibility, errors, ABIs, they realize there are hundreds of edgecases that must be accounted for. For example structure returns on the windows ABI change the ordering of function call arguments depending on the size of the structure, and additionally require redundant memory operations (and failing to do both will cause your compiler to work for some libraries but not others).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

amedvednikov 7y ago

Hello, Developer here. The release was messed up by me having serious git troubles. I had to destroy the repository twice, as the result and old README file with the wrong instructions resulted in everyone having segfaults. Everything will work as expected in a couple of days. Launching such a big project for hundreds (thousands?) of testers is not easy.

sfilargi 7y ago
It’s just a toy project my friend. Stop marketing it as something extraordinary.
faiface 7y ago
So, what are the correct instructions? I followed the instructions on the GitHub and yes, I'm getting segfaults.
- amedvednikov 7y ago
  can you `wget https://vlang.io/v.c` https://vlang.io/v.c` again?
  - faiface 7y ago
    Okay, I did and I was able to compile the `vc` compiler from the C source. The REPL in `vc` seems to work (at least for the basic printing I tried) and running `./vc -o v .` worked as well. But the new `v` compiler segfaults with: coudlnt create file "/var/tmp/vlang0.0.12//vrepl.v" Segmentation fault (core dumped) EDIT: however, if I understand it correctly, it was not the instructions after all, that resulted in everyone having segfaults... EDIT2: okay, so I redownloaded the whole thing and yes, you fixed that now. But it still segfaults sometimes. For example if I try to pass a `-h` flag.
    - amedvednikov 7y ago
      You had to do `git pull` to fix the "V" V binary :) Forgot to mention that, sorry. It's going to be much, much more stable in the coming days.

AndyKelley 7y ago

Dan, it seems like you're referring to me, and I don't appreciate this food fight characterization. In society it is the duty of everyone to call out scam artists to protect each other and that's exactly what happened in that thread. At the time, it was a scam, since the author was collecting money from people on false claims. Respect is not only contained in tone of voice, but also in how honest one chooses to be. However, since then, two things have happened: 1. The source has been provided. 2. The website has been updated to note which features are unavailable. So, this is now my position which I have stated elsewhere: > Now that the website has the "WIP" label to communicate which features are not available, and the source is released, I no longer consider this project to be fraudulent. The information is available to everyone, and people who donate on Patreon are making an informed choice. > I'm genuinely glad it turned out this way. Good luck on your endeavor, and welcome to the programming languages club.

sfilargi 7y ago
I think you are being a bit more than generous here. What this revealed to be is a bit more than a university Computer Languages assignment. A toy project if you want.
dang 7y ago
Not only you! and fair enough, I've removed food from my comment above. The previous thread was still an unseemly flamewar, with gratuitous drama of the sort we definitely don't need on HN. It caused a universal WTF among the HN staff. I gather that in some cases this drama was being imported from internet rumbles elsewhere. Those need to stay elsewhere, and people here need to follow HN's guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Calling someone else a scam artist and their work a fraud is an example of this and is obviously not respectful, however honest it may be. Moreover, if you begin by turning the knobs up to 11 ("This guy is a complete fraud"), there's nowhere else left to go, which explains why the discussion after that was so lousy—not that it excuses any other commenter. I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393 and marked it off-topic. Edit: in case it isn't clear, I'm not taking a side about the technical issues. I haven't looked closely at them (or at all), and these points about the site guidelines hold even if one side was 100% right and the other 100% wrong, or vice versa.

fogottenuser02 7y ago

This was supposed to be originally posted on Dang's post. Evidently, criticizing the mob-boss isn't allowed now. AndyKelley never ever forget why Ycombinator runs a "news" site. YCombinator is a propaganda and VC funnel for upcoming projects that might make them money. The convenient excuses of tone policing is to not scare away upcoming companies and orgs that might be reprehensible to the public, but fit into the idea of (0) Moloch. The SEC only requires significant transparency to Public corporations, which YC doesn't primarily work with. So, they can be as opaque and 'fake news'-ish as they wish. And they do, via "Hacker News". HN/dang has removed and/or modified and/of split off threads to lessen the impact of projects that affect them. And my guess is that V is one of those projects that caught their eye. Instead, you'll see dang and similar giving edicts from above dismissing and ignoring legitimate complaints. Why? It all boils down to money. And YC wants more. Is that really surprising? Now, why aren't I posting under my usual username? Because bans, hellbans, and other 'bad user' flags are a thing. And YC would never approach such transparency. They won't even try for the GDPR, and that's saying something. (0) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ ------------------------------------------- (My response, since you flagged it: If we listened to anything you've taught us, you don't do something you're good at for free. So, why do you run a news site? It's certainly not out of the goodness of your heart. My not-so-dark-idea is it benefits Ycombinator in a significant way. )

dang 7y ago
I'd happily respond, but this comment is like a greased pig: there's nothing to latch onto. Well, there's one thing: nothing about that project affects YC or HN or us, and we haven't conspired to "lessen the impact". The sinister specifics people come up with! What catches my eye is flamewars on Hacker News, because part of being a janitor is mopping those up. Our deep dark purpose? To have an internet forum that doesn't suck. Unless you have plumbed my unconscious and know my thoughts better than I do, that's all we're trying to achieve. That alone is plenty valuable, so it's all we need to optimize for. p.s. Nobody flagged your reply. It got caught in a software filter, and moderators unkilled it, as we often do.
- 7y ago

withoutboats 7y ago

It's pretty obvious that this person has essentially lied: they have not implemented the complex features they claim while they hype benefits like compile time and lack of non-zero cost features that will have to disappear when they have implemented what they promised. But I think what's more interesting, more telling, is the level of vitriol over 12k/year in patreon subscriptions. Funding in open source is so absurdly unequal that people are outraged over someone earning table scraps. EDIT: No idea why this was flagged, I don't understand the norms of this strange website.

staticassertion 7y ago
The only thing developers seem to hate more than closed source software is a funded open source project.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  Not in general, but many open source developers do hard work and do sometimes not even get praise, so they don't like it when someone who they feel did not work so hard or not at all and just promised unrealistic things, get's the money. (not judging about that case here)
  - staticassertion 7y ago
    This sounds to me like that same attitude that keeps people from saying how much they make; that your coworker will get mad at you, and not your boss.
    - hutzlibu 7y ago
      A bit, yes. Except in cases where people make money from a limited avaiable fund, by lying.
      - staticassertion 7y ago
        "limited available fund" ah yes, the software industry really does barely manage to scrape by, good point.

13415 7y ago

The name is good, the language has very cool features on the roadmap. I'd find it interesting even if it was just a concept with no implementation at all, so I don't get what people complain about it. Where do all these naysayers come from? Do they hold personal grudges? If it included an optional GC, version 1.0 of V would probably be my favorite language and I'll definitely follow its future development.

mises 7y ago

Wow, did dang really remove all the replies to his comment? Here's what it looked like a few hours ago; it was still open in my browser. https://u.teknik.io/pD724.png https://u.teknik.io/pD724.png Those comments were generally respectful; I saw no reason to remove them. Seems over-zealous to get rid of any disagreement with a moderator's decision.

edflsafoiewq 7y ago
No, the subthread was just detached and marked off topic. Scroll down a bit more to find it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251706. This is a common moderator action on HN.
- mises 7y ago
  Maybe it would be better for him to amend to his comment that "further discussion on this comment has been moved to here:"
  - dang 7y ago
    We might eventually change the software to provide links to things like previous children and previous parents, for those who like to follow these things. But it isn't clear to me how to do it without complicating the UI, which would be a cost that exceeds the benefit.

phrmoy 7y ago

Go V! (no pun intended).

lkjasdfmls 7y ago

I'm always excited to see updates on V