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V Language Review

mawfig.github.io

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Re: V Language Review

#91

Post by AndyKelley »

mawfig wrote: post #46
faitswulff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a horse in this race, but when a language makes present-tense claims about its features I assume that they're already functioning features. People are poking holes in V because its claims are unfounded, not because they've decided they're in competition with the language. A simple "work in progress" sign on the features in question would draw a lot of fire away from the language and its creator.

Indeed! I even mentioned this in my "Rules of engagement" section: > Features indicated to be incomplete/work in progress/unimplemented will be mentioned as such. Indicating on the vlang.io homepage how much of the language has yet to be realized would go a long way in my opinion.

After I criticized the project for collecting donations on deceitful information, the author put purple "WIP" labels next to a bunch of stuff [1] which led me to make this statement [2]. However, it looks like medvednikov has since removed the "WIP" labels.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/

[2]: https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1142503808901308418

Re: V Language Review

#92

Post by yellowapple »

pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #6

At this point, why do people even spend time on debunking the marketing claims of this language at all? It's been done to death, whoever was going to be convinced the V developer is a charlatan has already been convinced. For better or for worse.

I'm personally holding out some hope that it'll eventually live up to its marketing claims - which means that I'm interested in seeing whether or not it has progressed in that direction in the last 3 years.

Re: V Language Review

#93

Post by somethingor »

klyrs wrote: post #87
Tozen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why in the world do competitors of this programming language insist on dragging out evaluations from 3 years ago, which state that V is vaporware and before the language was even released? This is 2022, not 2019, and we are talking a hundred releases later ( https://github.com/vlang/v/releases ). At least stick to the current evaluation (or attack), which is more relevant, and make points from there. But, keep in min…

Your keep calling people "competitors." I don't think you're using the word right. Perhaps "detractors" is what you mean, but "reviewers" is more neutral. Xe and mawfig don't appear to be offering their own languages to compete with V. At one point, Andy Kelly (a "competitor") criticized the author's behavior, but he's also gone silent on the topic of V because of the vitriol he encountered. One reason that people hi…

> Andy Kelly (a "competitor") criticized the author's behavior, but he's also gone silent on the topic of V because of the vitriol he encountered

AFAIK your stated reason for the silence is not accurate. Andy’s criticisms were always based on V making claims that no one could evaluate because it was closed source/unreleased (and then used those claims to solicit money from people). Once V was made open source, those criticisms no longer applied, as things like TFA could be written.

Re: V Language Review

#94

Post by klyrs »

somethingor wrote: post #93
klyrs wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your keep calling people "competitors." I don't think you're using the word right. Perhaps "detractors" is what you mean, but "reviewers" is more neutral. Xe and mawfig don't appear to be offering their own languages to compete with V. At one point, Andy Kelly (a "competitor") criticized the author's behavior, but he's also gone silent on the topic of V because of the vitriol he encountered. One reason that people hi…

> Andy Kelly (a "competitor") criticized the author's behavior, but he's also gone silent on the topic of V because of the vitriol he encountered AFAIK your stated reason for the silence is not accurate. Andy’s criticisms were always based on V making claims that no one could evaluate because it was closed source/unreleased (and then used those claims to solicit money from people). Once V was made open source, those…

Ah, fair enough, my memory is imperfect and I'm not inclined to paw through old HN comments.

Edit: ack, and I misspelled his name and the edit window closed

Re: V Language Review

#95

Post by longrod »

I never understood the motivations behind V. It's clearly not a hobby project started out by a developer who is genuinely experimenting with PLs and want to put out something unique. It feels more like a stunt or a flair to either extort money or become famous. All that would be perfectly okay if V did what it claims to do but the author fanatically makes exciting claims but implements only fluff to hide the underlying broken machinery.

I tried V when it first got popular (about 3 years ago). I am no expert on languages but the way it was ductaped (AST-less compiler for "performance", a "graphic library" when even basic things don't work etc etc) made me eventually lose interest.

3 years later V is still mostly where I left it. If the V author focused on the stabilizing the compiler instead of starting off shoot projects like vui, vdb etc. it might actually work.

Re: V Language Review

#97

Post by ivraatiems »

Am I wrong/naïve in thinking that a number of things mentioned here (no null pointer references, better bounds checking, immutability, pure functions by default) would be relatively easy to implement at least simple versions of in a language that compiles to C?

For example, the null pointer reference the author demonstrates would not be at all difficult to identify at compile time, it's literally just checking whether any structs are created with pointer properties initialized to 0. Checking for null pointers in all circumstances is much harder, but this particular example is easy. Why claim V supports this when it doesn't? Am I missing something about how hard it'd be to implement?

Re: V Language Review

#98

Post by aidenn0 »

Tozen wrote: post #36
smcl wrote: post #3

Christine Dodrill's early assessment of the language might be of interest here: https://xeiaso.net/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23 She doesn't pull any punches, but I think she was quite prescient in capturing the vibe of the project.

Why in the world do competitors of this programming language insist on dragging out evaluations from 3 years ago, which state that V is vaporware and before the language was even released? This is 2022, not 2019, and we are talking a hundred releases later ( https://github.com/vlang/v/releases ). At least stick to the current evaluation (or attack), which is more relevant, and make points from there. But, keep in min…

> Why in the world do competitors of this programming language insist on dragging out evaluations from 3 years ago...

This question is answered in the comment you just replied to:

> She doesn't pull any punches, but I think she was quite prescient in capturing the vibe of the project.

Re: V Language Review

#99

Post by woodruffw »

ivraatiems wrote: post #97

Am I wrong/naïve in thinking that a number of things mentioned here (no null pointer references, better bounds checking, immutability, pure functions by default) would be relatively easy to implement at least simple versions of in a language that compiles to C? For example, the null pointer reference the author demonstrates would not be at all difficult to identify at compile time, it's literally just checking whethe…

You're not wrong. For the most part, these would be relatively easy to implement.

Pure functions are the hardest of the ones you've identified -- they're nominally easy if you have perfect purity information, but pretty difficult (impossible, in the general case) if you don't or if your definition of "pure" is just plain incorrect (like V's is).

Re: V Language Review

#100

Post by seebs »

Tozen wrote: post #38
mawfig wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for linking Xe's blog here! It's a few years old and I've seen a lot of comments on HN that suggest V has improved significantly since 2019 so I thought it might be worth looking into for myself and writing down a review of what I found.

Quoted post unavailable.

You say it "comes off as part of an effort ... to mount another attack". Maybe it does to you, but I don't know why. I've never heard of this "fierce and dirty" competition between young languages. I've never seen anything even a bit like that. I've only seen fierce fighting between advocates of large well-established languages.

Xe's post struck me as accurate at the time, and having that context to compare with makes V look a little better now, because it at least establishes that progress is being made towards those claims.

I don't know where you're getting the idea that this is based on some kind of sinister "personal agenda" other than "this thing sounds interesting, I investigated it, it seems less cool now", which is a pretty defensible position for someone to reach.

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