The V Programming Language

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.

Can you please follow the admonition at the top? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251393

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.

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).

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.