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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 lang
by 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 agoI 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 agoThat'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.
- sfilargi 7y agoThere is no neophobia. This is someone overselling his side toy-project and people calling him out.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago"neophobia" on HN? That's hilarious.
- lifthrasiir 7y agoIdeas are common goods. Virtually everything claimed by V was tried in at least one or other forms with varying degrees of success. As always the execution is hard.