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The V Programming Language

vlang.io

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Re: The V Programming Language

#271

Post by agumonkey »

staticassertion wrote: post #246
withoutboats wrote: post #230

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 absurd…

The only thing developers seem to hate more than closed source software is a funded open source project.

Not to pick on the guy, but when you're asking for funds before releasing source: is it "funded open source" ?

Surely people would have been a bit pissed if a strange project got backers, but the problem here was snake oil PR.

"It's amazing, better than anything else, just give me a bit of money and I'll give it to you when it's finished"

Re: The V Programming Language

#272

Post by lifthrasiir »

sesteel wrote: post #181

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 bot…

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.

Re: The V Programming Language

#273

Post by lifthrasiir »

staticassertion wrote: post #253
hutzlibu wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit, yes. Except in cases where people make money from a limited avaiable fund, by lying.

"limited available fund" ah yes, the software industry really does barely manage to scrape by, good point.

Funding programming language development via Patreon is relatively new that it might be a reasonable characterization. I do think that many PL projects are underfunded and should have better BMs to sustain itself, and one positive aspect of V is that it showed you can actually have a good chance of sustainable cash inflow with proper marketing (more generally, [1] is a good start).

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-tea...

Re: The V Programming Language

#274

Post by reikonomusha »

dom96 wrote: post #266
bscphil wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that the website now has "WIP" annotations on many of the claims. I'm not sure how recently these were added as this thread is my introduction to the language. My assessment (not a language designer) is that this is something that shows some promise as a transpiled language for people who want a Go-like language without some of the common pain points and are OK with having no GC. I would add that pe…

> It's worth noting that the website now has "WIP" annotations on many of the claims. I'm not sure how recently these were added as this thread is my introduction to the language. Indeed, many of these have been added just today. But even with the WIP tags many of these claims still seem false, for example, the author asserts that "V compiles ≈1.2 million lines of code per second per CPU core." but below that notes t…

I read in one of the issues that he compiled some thousands of calls to print, one per line, and that was the benchmark.

Re: The V Programming Language

#276

Post by edgeyboy »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #265
edgeyboy wrote: post #164

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 a…

What's insecure about curl and mkdir?

They're called through os.system.

Say that you have a website that relies on downloading content from URLs supplied by users. A user can send a "specially constructed" URL ("anything;commandgoeshere") and run any command they'd like on your server.

Re: The V Programming Language

#277

Post by esimov »

ScottFree wrote: post #256
hutzlibu wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit, yes. Except in cases where people make money from a limited avaiable fund, by lying.

He hasn't lied about anything. If you do a search in these comments for people who have actually given him money, I think you'll find that none of us have done so under the pretense that all the features he listed on the website are finished. We're also not "buying" anything. We're supporting a developer who is writing a language we would like to one day use. How else is it going to get written? Do we expect somebody…

It's not about founding or donation, it's all about false promises. How you can give false assumptions about something which does not exists and it's not provable. I'm thinking here about all the optimistic features the author is acclaiming. As some of the commenters mentioned practically is impossible to build a product (a new programming language) in solo and having only a couple of thousands of LOC.

Re: The V Programming Language

#278

Post by ithkuil »

holy_city wrote: post #268
ithkuil wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closures could be used to implement this use case, provided that they can be exported/represented as native C function pointets, e.g. via a trampoline that captures the necessary captured context)

How would you implement the trampoline without a global? And would the captured context not count as a global? In C the only memory available to a function is its arguments and data with static duration. That static storage is synonymous with global state, if it isn't known at compile time.

We have to distinguish what the given language exposes to its users and how the code such language generated works on the underlying hardware (along with constraints due to compatibility with other languages, most importantly C which is the de-facto system interface nowadays).

A C-compatible closure basically requires an executable chunk of memory that captures the state along with the istructions to push it to the parameters area (based on the architecture's calling convention) and then jumping to the actual function.

This is not global just because it's scoping the state with the function. On the other hand it becomes global the moment it gets installed to a global handler table (because there can only be one such handler).

However a language that limits globals (and forces people through this kind of hoops in order to deal with cases where singletons are really needed) encourages a coding style that makes it easier to test your code in isolation.

Re: The V Programming Language

#279

Post by kamaal »

estebank wrote: post #162

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 c…

>>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.

>>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.

You would be very interested in seeing the source code of Perl 1.

Re: The V Programming Language

#280

Post by ksec »

dang wrote: post #180
ksec wrote: post #140

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

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 . 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=comme... ). In this…

Thanks. I wasn't aware of that thread. ( And I was wondering why about the hostility towards it )
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