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Hello V-Lang

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Re: Hello V-Lang

#61

Post by Rochus »

amedvednikov wrote: post #46
Rochus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the author just likes to implement programming languages and sets high goals. All those who have experience with this know that it is a lot of work. Apparently, the author has been working on this for many years and has achieved a lot. I recently bought the Packt book; what is not clear to me at the moment is what are the specific innovations over the other already established languages. Thus, it would be helpf…

> what is not clear to me at the moment is what are the specific innovations over the other already established languages. I'll make it more clear on the website. There's already a comparison to Go, the language V is most similar to: https://vlang.io/compare#go Quite a lot of improvements. V is basically about having the performance of C, the ease of use of Python, the simplicity of Go.

Thanks for the link; that's going in the direction I was looking for. So could one say that V is essentially the Go the author would have wanted, and the new language is justified by the "~20%" difference, and an independent development is necessary due to the slow pace at which Go is evolving? So that would be a similar motivation as Nim versus Python, or Oberon+ versus Oberon.

The feature differences in list form are helpful; but the priorities and motivation for individual features would also be interesting; e.g. why is "variable shadowing" bad and why is the V approach better, and how can smaller runtime and binaries smaller by a factor of 100 be achieved with a feature set that is at least 80% the same as Go? Does this really have to do with the language definition, or rather with the implementation?

Re: Hello V-Lang

#62

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

Interesting definition of 'pure functions':

    Pure functions by default
    V functions are pure by default, meaning that their return values are a 
    function of their arguments only, and their evaluation has no side effects 
    (besides I/O).
https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/doc/docs.md#pure-func...

Re: Hello V-Lang

#63

Post by sieste »

Normille wrote: post #2

What a piss-poor excuse for an article! Reads like a press release; all puff and no down sides. Anyone with any familiarity with the V project will know it's been mired in controversy from day 1, thanks to the [often hyperbolic] claims of its inventor. All of which seems to have passed the author of this article by, as he just gushingly repeats them unquestioningly. Mind you, he does describe V as "all new", so maybe…

HN is usually an incredibly welcoming and encouraging community. Any criticisms are honest, sometimes harsh and maybe on the overly sceptical side, but mostly decent and civilised ... Unless Vlang comes up.

> What a piss-poor excuse for an article!

The article is no different from many new-sexy-js-framework blog posts I see here, but these never get that amount of hate. Why is that?

Re: Hello V-Lang

#64

Post by [deleted] »

kgeist wrote: post #24

Last time I checked V-Lang looked amazing on paper but on closer evaluation many of the claimed features were only planned, crashed the compiler on trivial inputs, or simply were half-baked and didn't deliver on the promises (things like syntax errors from the underlying C backend, memory leaks etc. because transpilation was straightforward and lacked proper checks, hence the fast compilation speed). A few months ago…

[deleted]

Re: Hello V-Lang

#65

Post by dmytrish »

scns wrote: post #23
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are also people who have built even harder projects than V, but can still criticize projects with issues and rant with the best of them! The absolute dichotomy being "doers" and "criticizers" is false. Linus could criticize things just fine.

Have seen Linus giving the finger to Nvidia, but not ranting on a forum about a new language.

Here you go: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus

Re: Hello V-Lang

#66

Post by kgeist »

amedvednikov wrote: post #38
paskozdilar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not really, here's a benchmark of V compiling itself in 0.3 seconds that includes all steps (including the C -> binary part) and results in the compiler binary From what I've seen, you've used tcc for the benchmark, right? If so, that's kinda cheating, since tcc is written to be a simple as possible (and therefore as fast as possible), so the compilation time is essentially zero. Benchmarking with gcc with optimiza…

V is also written to be as simple as possible :) Compilation time is very important during development for the quick dev cycle (change, build, test). You don't need to do -O2 builds dozens of times per day. -prod (-O2) builds are definitely an order of magnitude slower, that's a fact.

Did you consider writing an interpreter for the quick dev cycle mode instead? Compilation times are down to 0 seconds (if we ignore the parsing time). As LuaJIT's Mike Pall has shown, a well-thought out interpreter can be as fast as a naive compiler. It's also more portable, and experiments are easier to introduce. The main page at vlang.io focuses on compilation speed, not runtime speed. You also admit that the fast compilation mode uses simpler backends without optimizations. So why not just interpret it, if compilation speed and quick dev cycles is number one priority? That's what interpreted languages already excel at.

Re: Hello V-Lang

#67

Post by throwaway4good »

throwamon wrote: post #35
WithinReason wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we were all more susceptible to hype when we were 15

Maybe, but I can tell you when I was 15 I didn't have instant worldwide reach and the on-the-Internet-nobody-knows-you're-a-dog effect at my disposal, and neither did my readers.

I grew up with if you build people will come.

I don’t think it is like that anymore …

Re: Hello V-Lang

#68

Post by dmytrish »

sieste wrote: post #63
Normille wrote: post #2

What a piss-poor excuse for an article! Reads like a press release; all puff and no down sides. Anyone with any familiarity with the V project will know it's been mired in controversy from day 1, thanks to the [often hyperbolic] claims of its inventor. All of which seems to have passed the author of this article by, as he just gushingly repeats them unquestioningly. Mind you, he does describe V as "all new", so maybe…

HN is usually an incredibly welcoming and encouraging community. Any criticisms are honest, sometimes harsh and maybe on the overly sceptical side, but mostly decent and civilised ... Unless Vlang comes up. > What a piss-poor excuse for an article! The article is no different from many new-sexy-js-framework blog posts I see here, but these never get that amount of hate. Why is that?

Because nobody wants to deal with another PHP in the unlikely case V takes off.

Re: Hello V-Lang

#69

Post by coldtea »

scns wrote: post #23
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are also people who have built even harder projects than V, but can still criticize projects with issues and rant with the best of them! The absolute dichotomy being "doers" and "criticizers" is false. Linus could criticize things just fine.

Have seen Linus giving the finger to Nvidia, but not ranting on a forum about a new language.

I have seen Joe Armstrong, Alan Kay, Paul Graham, and many others ranting about other languages in many ocassions...

Re: Hello V-Lang

#70

Post by amedvednikov »

kgeist wrote: post #66
amedvednikov wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

V is also written to be as simple as possible :) Compilation time is very important during development for the quick dev cycle (change, build, test). You don't need to do -O2 builds dozens of times per day. -prod (-O2) builds are definitely an order of magnitude slower, that's a fact.

Did you consider writing an interpreter for the quick dev cycle mode instead? Compilation times are down to 0 seconds (if we ignore the parsing time). As LuaJIT's Mike Pall has shown, a well-thought out interpreter can be as fast as a naive compiler. It's also more portable, and experiments are easier to introduce. The main page at vlang.io focuses on compilation speed, not runtime speed. You also admit that the fast…

Runtime speed is as fast as it gets, because it's C.

Writing an interpreter is a huge task. It works well without it. Actually I'd say it's quicker, because interpreters have startup costs.

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