3 ms·

How can a language be a scam?

by ecto 16d ago

MisterTea 16d ago
I have no opinion on the subject but I have found this to be an interesting dive into the supposed controversy: https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v
novacrazy 16d ago
The first release was just Go's parser ripped out and bolted onto a barebones first year of college level compiler, and touted as "safer than Rust", "compiles in milliseconds", etc. but didn't even have real type-checking at the time, nor did it free memory, and many other basic functionality. Furthermore, I vividly remember the author's Patreon advertised at the top of the page back then, and for a while he raked in a couple thousand dollars a month for it. However, over the years some actually talented people (and nowadays probably LLMs) have somehow sort of fixed most of the biggest warts, but it's still nowhere near what it advertised in that first release.
- morpheos137 16d ago
  Lol this is interesting. If you want to make money you can "invent" a language. With LLMs you could probably make it pretty decent too.
- giancarlostoro 16d ago
  What's wild is I was looking at the language's home page again, and looking to find their GitHub, the first GitHub link I noticed, is the GitHub sponsors link. I don't mind supporting a project like this, but this is a bit excessive. Was it really Go's parser? That wouldn't surprise me, but also that kind of makes sense to me why it looked a bit 'familiar' in terms of syntax. It's definitely been "alpha" tier for a while, which it doesnt help that the developer doesn't outline any sort of stability that I can recall (back then at least) which imho if you're publishing a language, you should let the reader know.
  - amedvednikov 16d ago
    No, it wasn't Go's parser. That's easy to check.
- torstenvl 16d ago
  Can you explain what you mean by this? They haven't had a first release yet. They're still in beta.
  - novacrazy 16d ago
    That's being pedantic. The first public announcement was many years ago.
    - torstenvl 16d ago
      It appears you're calling something a scam because an early alpha version was early alpha quality. If so, that would be unprofessional and inflammatory. I'm open to being wrong. So again, can you explain what you mean?
      - novacrazy 16d ago
        I have this amazing new thing I'm making, nothing like it, better than everything else. Here's a prototype that does none of that and is _barely_ functional. Care to invest $2000? If so, do I have a bridge to show you...
      - wk_end 16d ago
        If I go to the vlang releases page, I see literally hundreds of releases https://github.com/vlang/v/releases https://github.com/vlang/v/releases They haven't had a stable 1.0 release yet, but they've had many pre-1.0 releases. It's not some personal experiment that's been sitting in the dev's Github that people are piling onto; the author has gone out of their way to promote it, beg for donations, and lash out at any criticisms. The issue has never been the quality of the language per se, the issue has been 1) wildly misrepresenting the quality of the language in the present tense; 2) not even having any kind of a realistic roadmap towards achieving the kind of outsized and implausible claims about the quality of the language; and 3) using these outsized, implausible misrepresentations as a way of soliciting hype and funding for the author.
        16d ago
- 0x457 16d ago
  Can't have use-after-free errors if you never free.
agumonkey 16d ago
It was impossible to verify the "earth shattering claims" of the designer/users early on, and they would be very very emotional every time you just question the metrics. At one point there was a chart that was basically "for a given task, every compiler on earth: 1min, us: 0.1sec" And whenever you poke you found it seemed to be comparing apple and oranges and conversations often ended in v users crying because "this is a new project !" (yet, the crowd kept growing and they seemed to have produced larger and larger projects with this thing)
- amedvednikov 14d ago
  V has always compiled itself in <1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc
  - agumonkey 14d ago
    afaik it has none of the costly compiling passes..
    - amedvednikov 14d ago
      Transformer, checker, markused, binary generation are not costly? It takes GCC this much time to generate an unoptimized hello world.
      - agumonkey 13d ago
        i could never find any data on what would allow v to save so much time. i genuinely tried to find objective information, not kneejerk hate. you're the author it seems, so maybe you can give some hints ? i don't believe gcc is the absolute best, but even clang (I didn't check other languages/compilers) was lagging behind in the benchmarks which made me doubt it was not just comparing apple and oranges.

How can a language be a scam?

by ecto 16d ago

How can a language be a scam?

I have no opinion on the subject but I have found this to be an interesting dive into the supposed controversy: https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v

novacrazy 16d ago

The first release was just Go's parser ripped out and bolted onto a barebones first year of college level compiler, and touted as "safer than Rust", "compiles in milliseconds", etc. but didn't even have real type-checking at the time, nor did it free memory, and many other basic functionality. Furthermore, I vividly remember the author's Patreon advertised at the top of the page back then, and for a while he raked in a couple thousand dollars a month for it. However, over the years some actually talented people (and nowadays probably LLMs) have somehow sort of fixed most of the biggest warts, but it's still nowhere near what it advertised in that first release.

morpheos137 16d ago
Lol this is interesting. If you want to make money you can "invent" a language. With LLMs you could probably make it pretty decent too.
giancarlostoro 16d ago
What's wild is I was looking at the language's home page again, and looking to find their GitHub, the first GitHub link I noticed, is the GitHub sponsors link. I don't mind supporting a project like this, but this is a bit excessive. Was it really Go's parser? That wouldn't surprise me, but also that kind of makes sense to me why it looked a bit 'familiar' in terms of syntax. It's definitely been "alpha" tier for a while, which it doesnt help that the developer doesn't outline any sort of stability that I can recall (back then at least) which imho if you're publishing a language, you should let the reader know.
- amedvednikov 16d ago
  No, it wasn't Go's parser. That's easy to check.
torstenvl 16d ago
Can you explain what you mean by this? They haven't had a first release yet. They're still in beta.
- novacrazy 16d ago
  That's being pedantic. The first public announcement was many years ago.
  - torstenvl 16d ago
    It appears you're calling something a scam because an early alpha version was early alpha quality. If so, that would be unprofessional and inflammatory. I'm open to being wrong. So again, can you explain what you mean?
    - novacrazy 16d ago
      I have this amazing new thing I'm making, nothing like it, better than everything else. Here's a prototype that does none of that and is _barely_ functional. Care to invest $2000? If so, do I have a bridge to show you...
    - wk_end 16d ago
      If I go to the vlang releases page, I see literally hundreds of releases https://github.com/vlang/v/releases https://github.com/vlang/v/releases They haven't had a stable 1.0 release yet, but they've had many pre-1.0 releases. It's not some personal experiment that's been sitting in the dev's Github that people are piling onto; the author has gone out of their way to promote it, beg for donations, and lash out at any criticisms. The issue has never been the quality of the language per se, the issue has been 1) wildly misrepresenting the quality of the language in the present tense; 2) not even having any kind of a realistic roadmap towards achieving the kind of outsized and implausible claims about the quality of the language; and 3) using these outsized, implausible misrepresentations as a way of soliciting hype and funding for the author.
      - 16d ago
0x457 16d ago
Can't have use-after-free errors if you never free.

agumonkey 16d ago

It was impossible to verify the "earth shattering claims" of the designer/users early on, and they would be very very emotional every time you just question the metrics. At one point there was a chart that was basically "for a given task, every compiler on earth: 1min, us: 0.1sec" And whenever you poke you found it seemed to be comparing apple and oranges and conversations often ended in v users crying because "this is a new project !" (yet, the crowd kept growing and they seemed to have produced larger and larger projects with this thing)

amedvednikov 14d ago
V has always compiled itself in <1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc
- agumonkey 14d ago
  afaik it has none of the costly compiling passes..
  - amedvednikov 14d ago
    Transformer, checker, markused, binary generation are not costly? It takes GCC this much time to generate an unoptimized hello world.
    - agumonkey 13d ago
      i could never find any data on what would allow v to save so much time. i genuinely tried to find objective information, not kneejerk hate. you're the author it seems, so maybe you can give some hints ? i don't believe gcc is the absolute best, but even clang (I didn't check other languages/compilers) was lagging behind in the benchmarks which made me doubt it was not just comparing apple and oranges.