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V Language Review (2023)

n-skvortsov-1997.github.io

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Re: V Language Review (2023)

#111

Post by baranul »

Cavallium wrote: post #39
12_throw_away wrote: post #13

I know it's a meaningless metric, but I still find myself wondering how, exactly, vlang got to 35K stars on github, very much in the same order of magnitude as, say, cpython with 58K.

A lot of vlang-related statistics are very suspicious, probably some of the metrics are boosted by a click farm or something similar. For example, 99% of the global google searches about "vlang" are from Beijing. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Was curious, so checked up. V has Chinese contributors[2] and who have also translated their documentation from English to Chinese[1]. As was mentioned, other languages have Chinese followings too.

[1] https://www.bookstack.cn/search/result?wd=Vlang

[2] https://lydiandylin.gitbook.io/

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#112

Post by baranul »

avgcorrection wrote: post #75
arp242 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this play out a few times now in a few different communities: systemd, Gnome/GTK, wider JavaScript and PHP communities, and probably some others. There is legitimate reasonable criticism of these things, even today. However, they have also been subject to profoundly unreasonable – even unhinged – criticism, and this has created a rather unhealthy dynamic where both reasonable and unreasonable criticism are…

> However, they have also been subject to profoundly unreasonable – even unhinged – criticism, and this has created a rather unhealthy dynamic where both reasonable and unreasonable criticism are all treated the same by the developers. You kind of need to insulate yourself to some degree. If you need to insulate yourself to the degree that you ban someone for answering the question “V or Go?” with “Go, obviously”[1]…

> However, they have also been subject to profoundly unreasonable – even unhinged – criticism, and this has created a rather unhealthy dynamic where both reasonable and unreasonable criticism are all treated the same by the developers.

What he is saying rings true. There is a level to all of this "that's beyond the pale".

> Is V production-ready?—no. Is Go? Yes, for a long time.

Go is a 10 years older (from 2009) corporate creation. It's not an apples to apples comparison, which can easily set the stage for tension in an interaction. It does not make sense to compare how production-ready a much older language is to a younger volunteer open source language in beta (and whose site and version number indicate that's so).

Re: V Language Review (2023)

#113

Post by baranul »

lkey wrote: post #9

V's claims have always been dubious on their face. It promised the programming language equivalent of magic with no overhead. I'm glad that someone took the time to print receipts. The author clearly wants a reckoning, but he's unlikely to receive satisfaction. The people that still use or evangelize V are locked in, the contradictions will only make their belief stronger. Alex is a bullshitter, and arguing with some…

The language is worked on by a group of people from around the world, not just Alex. It has to be looked at as a group effort. The total contributor count is at 722, as of today. There is a lot of rhetoric thrown around as criticism or being attributed to the language creator, but it's not anything he actually wrote. So the point of it, where and why, comes across as really strange.

For instance, not understanding why try so hard to push a 2023 review for an old version of the language, when we are in 2024. But ok, here this is. It comes across as not being neutral because of the very personal dispute against V's creator, as revealed at the bottom of the blog. The super strange ranting displayed by the reviewer at the bottom, destroys all sense of neutrality, and disputably its credibility.

The review itself has various errors or problems that people gloss over or haven't caught some of: 1) It's weird to be complaining about autofree, when the documentation says its WIP and go use the GC for now. They clearly are giving user options for managing memory. 2) He was using the wrong or ignoring other compiler options. 3) The reviewer seems to be intentionally distorting or misrepresenting the coroutine situation; it's WIP and will be used on the Windows OS. 4) It's open source. Report to them or go help fix whatever is the issue, as other people have (hundreds of contributors).

For example, with the coroutines part, research (site and documentation) shows the V project will be using both OS threads and green threads for concurrency. Right now, they use OS threads, with the `spawn` and `go` keywords. In the future, the `go` keyword will only be for green threads, which the critic is referring to (corounties). At V's site, they are working on coroutines (green threads) for the Windows OS and are steadily working on implementing that into the language.

I would think most reasonable people would cut a volunteer open source project some slack and allow them time to improve upon what they are doing, but there appears to be some weird rush and other intent going on. Don't see V's community attacking anybody, just them happily focusing on their language, but it seems a lot of people are going after them, really hard.

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