[HN Gopher] V Language Review (2023)
___________________________________________________________________
V Language Review (2023)
Author : thunderbong
Score : 146 points
Date : 2024-02-24 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (n-skvortsov-1997.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (n-skvortsov-1997.github.io)
| Alifatisk wrote:
| I remember there was some controversy or drama with V a couple of
| years ago regarding the language.
|
| I forgot what it was about but I haven't heard about V since
| then. This article was interesting to read!
| mratsim wrote:
| Overpromise and underdeliver.
|
| And lots of funding for then vaporware
| gnuvince wrote:
| Isn't that our entire industry though?
| klyrs wrote:
| Speak for yourself, some of us have principles.
| ck45 wrote:
| Isn't it about the authors have been overpromising and
| underdelivering since the beginning?
| https://mawfig.github.io/2022/06/18/v-lang-in-2022.html is a
| year older than this article, still interesting and it links to
| some other articles right at the beginning.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| If the author wanted e-fame (the good kind or the bad kind),
| they absolutely got it.
| artemonster wrote:
| V claims to be the next best thing that ever happened since
| sliced bread, but instead its development over years is just
| yak shaving on steroids. These review posts just prove that.
| jug wrote:
| Strangely super vigorous rant about a language that fell into
| obscurity early on.
| archsurface wrote:
| "a summary of my experience with the language over 6 months " --
| I was only able to use it for a week around Christmas before
| hitting compiler bugs. I like the look of it, but I can't
| currently use it.
| TwentyPosts wrote:
| To be fair, I ran into a compiler bug in Zig within a few hours
| of using it. I'd still expect Zig to be a lot less buggy than
| V, based on what I heard.
|
| Last time I looked at V it just seemed like the language wanted
| to have it all. No tradeoffs, just "The best parts of Rust and
| Go" with no explanation how that's remotely achievable (and it
| wasn't, judging by the attempts to make "auto free" memory
| management happen, and having to discover first hand that this
| is not a good approach, and the problem is turing complete).
| chrisaycock wrote:
| Some highlights: - autofree doesn't work -
| memory arenas (prealloc) isn't thread safe - compiler
| produces large binaries - coroutines invoke blocking calls
| - community behavior is, uh, "unwelcoming"
| lkey wrote:
| 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 someone like
| that is pointless.
| agumonkey wrote:
| What's amazing is how large the community became and how strong
| their love and belief was.
| attractivechaos wrote:
| The V devs have promised a lot, have missed a lot but have
| also achieved a lot. I have written a few short programs in
| V. IMHO, the V syntax is concise and intuitive and the
| performance is good. It is lightweight and easy to install
| and to use. The blog post is probably right that V has many
| rough edges but I would say the core features in V are well
| planned. I actually prefer it over some other more popular
| languages. That said, because V hasn't reached 1.0, it is
| probably too early to use it in production.
| bscphil wrote:
| Yeah, when the article skipped over the first two memory
| management strategies to point out issues with manual
| memory management and an "automatic" strategy that is
| unfinished or broken, it really struck me that it's quite
| impressive for a single author to have a functional, fast
| language with a working garbage collector _and_ arena
| allocator (with some issues) in only a few years.
|
| The criticisms in the article, which I just read beginning
| to end, are largely about features it claims to provide (or
| claims are in development) that either no other language
| has, are an improvement on other languages, or are state of
| the art features in world class languages with hundreds to
| thousands of times more developer hours.
|
| On the one hand, it's not wrong to criticize the overly
| ambitious nature of V's plans nor criticize the poor
| attitude and self-advertising strategies of its lead
| author. On the other hand, I'm not sure that the article
| _is_ doing that, it seems much more interested in taking
| one of these features, showing that it doesn 't work, and
| saying "so there!". But the fact that _these_ are the
| features being complained about, not the core of the
| language, says something in itself.
|
| Likewise, the fact that a hobbyist language with a single
| primary developer has terrible documentation is at the very
| least par for the course. Heck, I've found the Zig
| documentation horrific (in the past), and that has way more
| developer time and mindshare. Compare it to, say, the Oil
| shell (at least, where it was a few years ago), if you want
| to be fair.
|
| I'm not convinced that the blog author _isn 't_ a troll, in
| some sense of the word. Clearly, many of their criticisms
| are well founded. Clearly, Alex does not react well to
| criticism. Clearly, V kinda sucks for practical use right
| now in a lot of ways that _do_ matter. But the post
| (especially the end) feels like an excuse to stir the pot,
| not well-intentioned criticism. The author seems to want to
| use this post to counteract people they feel have
| mistreated them (with some justification).
|
| Note: I say all this as a complete outsider. I've never
| written a line of V code and probably never will. My only
| prior experience is that I'm familiar with the controversy
| around V, especially on this site.
| ptx wrote:
| > _quite impressive for a single author to have a
| functional, fast language with a working garbage
| collector_
|
| From what I gather from the article, they didn't
| implement a garbage collector, but rather integrated the
| Boehm GC. This is a conservative collector, so it doesn't
| collect all garbage.
|
| > _But the fact that these are the features being
| complained about, not the core of the language, says
| something in itself._
|
| Memory management is a core part of a language. According
| to the article this core part doesn't work, which is a
| pretty big flaw.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's impressive.
|
| I've seen tons of computer science graduates hooking up
| gc to their languages in uni when they learn about
| compilers and programming languages
| remexre wrote:
| "link the Boehm GC" got one line on an assignment in my
| University's compiler's course; it's literally a matter
| of changing exec ["ld"; "-o"; out_file;
| obj_file]
|
| to exec ["ld"; "-o"; out_file;
| obj_file; "-lgc"]
|
| ...
| mort96 wrote:
| The problems with V has always been that its marketing is
| full of lies and its main selling points don't work as
| advertised. The same source code, but without the
| deception, might very well be an alright language.
|
| Just like how healing crystals are perfectly fine if what
| you want is decoration and you think they look pretty. It
| doesn't make the deceptive marketing okay.
| babel_ wrote:
| > _it 's quite impressive for a single author to have a
| functional, fast language with a working garbage
| collector and arena allocator (with some issues) in only
| a few years._
|
| As the included code shows, the gc is boehm gc, and
| checking their repo shows they just include libgc/bdwgc.
| This is absolutely not a knock against anyone here, it's
| just about the standard library for this need, and I
| think it is a far smarter move to use it than for most to
| attempt to make their own general-purpose gc (though
| boehm can't catch all leaks).
|
| I feel it would be wrong, however, to characterise this
| as being a single author having made a language _with_ a
| gc and arenas, as if those were significant parts of the
| author 's own developments, rather than using a well-
| picked import and a half-baked implementation of
| "arenas", which here are really just a global linked list
| of buffers, freed only at exit, and so everything leaks
| [0]. They're not really arenas, you can't use them
| locally in a region of code or as scratchpads, let alone
| multi-thread it. By their code's own admission, it's just
| a little pre-allocation to batch mallocs for all the
| little heap allocations of a GC-assuming codebase, so
| they're not _really_ arenas like you 'd use in C or
| elsewhere.
|
| Not unimpressive, it's a valid approach for some uses
| (though not general purpose), it's just different from a
| language _with_ their own gc and actual arenas. Indeed,
| just implementing an arena barely even registers in the
| complexity, I feel, as arenas really should be very
| simple in most use cases [1]. It would be far more
| impressive to have them actually integrated and be
| available as a true alternative to a GC for memory
| management, particularly integrating common patterns
| (e.g. [2]) in a way that could serve as a drop-in
| replacement, such that we can actually provide bounded
| lifetimes and memory safety without a full GC, let alone
| support multiple concurrencies with it from multi-
| threading to coroutines -- this would likely still be
| unsafe without a GC compared to, say, Rust or Vale, let
| alone Pony or SPARK, and would likely require a cultural
| shift in manual management akin to Zig or Odin, as it may
| be largely moot if dependencies end up enforcing the gc
| themselves. Still, again, making anything substantial is
| never unimpressive, we just need to retain the
| perspective of what was achieved and how.
|
| As to the rest, well, I think it's fair to say that there
| should be a clear delineation between statements of "we
| can do this and here's how" and roadmaps with "we're
| aiming to do these things and here's our current
| progress". In my experience, people are quick to get
| these mixed up when they're excited about making
| something, and none of us are fully immune to this. It's
| not some moral failing or anything in and of itself, it
| can very easily be an honest mistake, but humans see
| patterns everywhere, so we often need to be receptive
| when others are trying to help us be level-headed and
| clear things up; otherwise a reputation begins to form.
| Especially in this industry, reproducibility matters, as
| we're all too familiar with the smoke-and-mirrors of
| demos (not to personally claim there is any here, just
| that it obviously helps dispel such concerns).
|
| And, of course, second chances are always offered if
| someone is willing to amend mistakes.
|
| [0]: prealloc.c.v is barely over 100 lines long and quite
| manageable, https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/vlib/b
| uiltin/prealloc...
|
| [1]: Chris Wellons, "Arena allocator tips and tricks",
| https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/09/27/
|
| [2]: Ryan Fleury, "Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena
| Allocator", https://www.rfleury.com/p/untangling-
| lifetimes-the-arena-all...
| firebaze wrote:
| The V lang author implicitly claims to understand CS
| theory better than quite a lot of people including Go and
| Rust lang devs.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Is the author better at marketing/sales/promising or
| programming (delivering)?
| mirashii wrote:
| To top it all off, prominent folks from the V community often
| engage in flamewars on this exact site. dang has threatened to
| ban the topic entirely before [1], and honestly at this point
| I'm pretty supportive of it.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37335249
| odiroot wrote:
| Whoa there. It's just a programming language. No need to spill
| vitriol over that.
|
| I have no skin in the game. Got into V very recently, because
| it appeals to me at face value.
|
| And in some ways better than other "better C" languages of
| today.
|
| For me it's just good enough. The syntax is sane, the compiler
| doesn't want to maniacally ruin my day, the standard library is
| already quite rich, and finally wrapping C code is a breeze.
| arp242 wrote:
| A good faith look at V is that it's very much a work-in-progress,
| and that at times the documentation is "aspirational" rather than
| "factual". I'm reminded by an remark from Bill Joy in an old
| interview talking about writing vi: "I wrote manual pages for all
| the great features we were going to do but never implemented".[1]
| We've all done that, right? I certainly have, including in public
| projects.
|
| There's a lot to be said about the wisdom of publishing material
| like this, and it's fine to object. But phrasings like "they were
| able to lie in every sentence" do not sit well with me,
| especially since the bit that follows doesn't actually disprove
| the claims all that well. It's assuming the worst possible
| motivation (intentional deception) rather than the much more
| likely motivation (small team, tad too much enthusiasm, and
| perhaps at times, inexperience). I'm not entirely trusting the
| objectivity of an author who describes these sort of things as
| "lies". Even worse are things like:
|
| > He lies that coroutines work with IO. I'll clarify that by
| working, I personally mean context switching when necessary, and
| not the fact that the program does not crash.
|
| So the functionality is correct, but not in a way the author
| would like it to, therefore it's a lie to claim it works. Eh?
| It's fine to criticize that the implementation isn't any good, of
| course, but employing such narrow definition of "works" and then
| calling someone a "liar" over it seems rather, eh, much.
|
| In short: not a fan.
|
| I'm not saying the V people have always smelled of roses either,
| but this article is definitely part of the problem with the
| general drama and toxicity surrounding V. I find it more than a
| little sad that vlang.io apparently needs Cloudflare DoS
| protection (I assume they didn't add it for the craic).
|
| [1]: https://begriffs.com/pdf/unix-review-bill-joy.pdf
| agumonkey wrote:
| that's musk approach, which is double edged sword
|
| interesting that bill joy did use a similar way, but i assume
| that an incomplete text editor is a lot less critical than a
| failing compiler :)
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't know what "musk approach" is, presumably referring to
| Elon Musk?
|
| > interesting that bill joy did use a similar way, but i
| assume that an incomplete text editor is a lot less critical
| than a failing compiler :)
|
| I think it's very common. GitHub is probably full of projects
| that do this to some degree. But most people also don't pay
| attention to these projects.
|
| I'm not saying the V people are without blame or couldn't
| have be better, but there's definitely a lot of toxic
| feedback looping going on here.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Musk says "full self driving car next year for 60k" means
| "partial self driving in 5 years for 75"
|
| I don't have a full explanation of why V made me so angry,
| but coming up with so many bold claims invalidating whole
| decades of an entire industry is mind boggling for sure.
| arp242 wrote:
| Ah right. Well, Tesla is a company, whereas V is
| basically just a few people working on it in their spare
| time. I don't think you can really compare the two or
| hold them to exactly the same standards.
|
| Or to put it in another way: people can be flawed, and I
| think that's okay. I don't think it's right to jump on
| that with assumptions of malice.
| vacuity wrote:
| I think people (and designers of other languages, in
| particular) were outraged that not only did V have the
| very aspirational claims, but there was also a Patreon
| (or similar) and the general attitude of the newly
| forming V community that felt undeserved for that level
| of...aspiration. I think that doesn't quite fall under
| malice, but I imagine it felt unfair to many.
| pharrington wrote:
| Do not say that your software does something that in fact, it
| does not do.
| fuzztester wrote:
| That should be one of the n commandments of software
| development.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| I don't think intentionally misrepresenting projects in their
| documentation is something "we've all done". Making _mistakes_
| in documentation is one thing, but turning a readme into an
| "aspirational" sales pitch with no disclaimers is baldly
| dishonest and worthy of scorn.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I agree with this perspective, in theory. Not liking how
| something is implemented is different than suggesting it isn't
| implemented. The real damning aspect of this is that criticism
| surrounding these decisions seems to result in the silencing of
| the critic. There are times where moderation and banning are
| necessary, such as when the critic resorts to name calling or
| trolling. Criticism can lead to more awareness which could lead
| to a better implementation down the pike, even if there's alot
| of headbutting in the process. Outright silencing the dissent
| is counterproductive.
|
| I also don't think reporting about being banned/silenced for
| such criticism is perpetuating the drama/toxicity of the
| community for the sake of it when it's a real world outcome.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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 all treated the same by the
| developers. You kind of _need_ to insulate yourself to some
| degree.
|
| For example, consider my write-up of the "GTK thumbnail
| issue" at [1] (I since deleted my account there, but that was
| written by me). It's easy to come off with a bad impression
| of the Gnome/GTK developers based on that, but at the same
| time ... they've been subject to so much unreasonable whining
| and criticism that it has also created this dynamic.
|
| There's tons of examples like this. Also see: every time GIMP
| comes up on HN, with people ranting and whining about all
| sorts of things. I wouldn't be surprised if the GIMP devs
| don't even bother reading HN any more.
|
| [1]: https://lobste.rs/s/ky5yop/gnome_has_no_thumbnails_file_
| pick...
| rstat1 wrote:
| I would argue that at least some of the grief GNOME gets is
| deserved. Especially given their attitude towards their
| users.
| arp242 wrote:
| As I said, _some_ grief is deserved in all these cases.
| But _unreasonable_ criticism makes people also not listen
| to more reasonable (deserved) criticism. That was my
| entire point.
|
| That you're completely ignoring this and instead just
| reply with an unsubstantial and off-topic dig at gnome is
| an excellent demonstration of my point.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > 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] then what's the point of even maintaining a
| community? All you'll end up with is a bunch of yes-women.
|
| [1] Is V production-ready?--no. Is Go? Yes, for a long
| time.
| klyrs wrote:
| I dunno, I've been using gimp for literally decades and for
| about a year recently, it couldn't paste from the
| clipboard. I didn't even bother reporting the bug because I
| knew I'd come across like an entitled whiner in today's
| atmosphere.
| pornel wrote:
| I can believe that it's just overconfidence and optimism gone
| too far.
|
| The problems they claim to solve look deceptively easy on the
| surface. Something like escape analysis (required for automatic
| borrowing without GC or refcounting) has many easy cases, but
| also incredibly hard or literally unsolvable edge cases.
|
| They may have been encouraged by progress on the easy cases,
| and assumed the rest is just a matter of a few bug fixes,
| rather than hitting the halting problem.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I don't know, if you say you have build a language that solved
| memory and safety issues without any overhead and performance
| impact, but in reality everything is a noop, you're lying. You
| can't claim you have solved some of the most difficult problems
| in language design but when challenged just say this was an
| aspirational statement.
|
| Apitational statements require that you have an idea how to get
| there. Even if you have that idea (why are you not at least
| saying how it would work), state that this is a goal, not a
| current status, otherwise it's a clear lie.
| bpfrh wrote:
| >So the functionality is correct, but not in a way the author
| would like it to, therefore it's a lie to claim it works. Eh?
| It's fine to criticize that the implementation isn't any good,
| of course, but employing such narrow definition of "works" and
| then calling someone a "liar" over it seems rather, eh, much.
|
| As far as I understood the article the coroutines don't work?
|
| If I write asynchronous code via a coroutine and one coroutine
| with io prevents all other coroutines from running that is not
| a working coroutine.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| But then why isn't the documentation updated? If the developer
| can start projects for UI and 3D graphics before the language
| is complete, surely there's also time to show at least the will
| to fix the constantly criticised honesty & transparency issues?
|
| > "I wrote manual pages for all the great features we were
| going to do but never implemented"
|
| Your source also mentions there were just two people working on
| the code and the manual was finished at release, so nobody
| except two people had access to unfinished documentation for a
| program that was done within two years...I don't think this is
| comparable.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| None of these points apply in this context. The context is that
| this project has been going on for many years, is popular
| (using the GitHub stars proxy), and has been criticized before.
| This isn't a fourteen year old kid trying to make a language
| and being naive about what it takes to achieve it.
|
| > I'm not saying the V people have always smelled of roses
| either, but this article is definitely part of the problem with
| the general drama and toxicity surrounding V.
|
| Meh. Complaining about the tone is so boring. The author is a
| bit upset but no one is disputing their technical arguments
| (I'm relying on others since they know more about it than me).
| whiterock wrote:
| Thank you for this. Saved me a lot of time and hassle -
| definietly steering clear of V land. A similar review for Nim
| would be of interest to me. Should not be that bad I'd hope.
| frfl wrote:
| Nim shouldn't really be used in the same sentence as V. I've
| never used Nim, but I've never seen anyone out right say
| anything negative like that's said of V. The only thing close
| to "negative" regarding Nim I've seen is this,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563796 and the thread it
| links to https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/10312
|
| I could be wrong of course. Maybe someone can point to actual
| negative aspects of the language or the community that I'm not
| aware of.
|
| Honestly if you're interested in Nim, go learn it. I've
| definitely seen it being used for a number of project, the most
| used that I know of is (was) nitter[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitter
| yogorenapan wrote:
| I've used Nim in the past. It is definitely not vaporware
| like V. It's a pretty pleasant language although I've since
| moved on to Zig.
| fao_ wrote:
| OH, Nim is the one with the asshole creator? I thought that
| was Zig, I get those two mixed up a lot
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I've written a few projects in Nim. Unfortunately there seems
| to be a big "civil war" happening right now in Nim land where
| it's the creator vs big-names going at it for some reason.
| Can't remember. Like if Chris McCord suddenly started fighting
| with Jose Valim and Elixir became split right down the middle.
|
| I stopped using Nim because I couldn't get over how bad the
| documentation was. Hard to navigate, hard to find what you need
| if you don't already know what it's called and examples are
| extremely convoluted instead of showing you the basics
| barebones first. I thought this problem would have less of an
| impact the longer I used Nim but years later it's still a
| thorny problem.
| crq-yml wrote:
| The creator not being able to community manage was why I left
| Nim - not "forever", but I moved on to other things. The
| language has some good ideas, but at that time development
| seemed to be heavily guided by two trolls who hung out in the
| IRC and complained, every day, about how they would never
| ever be able to do their projects without this one feature.
| Eventually I got into it with them and nobody got
| banned...which, of course, said to me that he was OK with
| toxicity, so I couldn't be bothered to stay.
|
| That, and a lot of the more advanced features were just
| broken.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| 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.
| dsp_person wrote:
| I've been comparing various projects in a particular domain and
| noticed that stars aren't the best indicator for
| adoption/maturity level. More interesting:
|
| - number of contributors
|
| - number of open/closed pull requests
|
| - number of open/closed issues
|
| Most of the time they scale with stars, but sometimes there
| will be 1k+ stars but only a few pull requests, which is odd.
| Cavallium wrote:
| 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=...
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| This makes very little sense to me. Keep in mind that Google
| is blocked in China, and has been for a long time, except
| maybe specific special machines from the government that may
| have unlimited access. Even if there is a lot of search
| interest from people using VPNs, it shouldn't show up as
| China.
| arp242 wrote:
| "golang" seems to have similar statistics: https://trends.goo
| gle.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
|
| So I'm not sure if that's evidence of metric boosting by a
| click farm, or anything else. Clicking on the question mark,
| it looks like it's not really a ranking of "where do searches
| come from", but rather "how popular is it in this region":
|
| > Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest
| point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of
| 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means
| that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there
| was not enough data for this term.
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| They have more starts than C# at 10k
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm awed at how far people would go both in studying, analyzing
| and writing about a language they clearly dislike.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Having a few people willing to go to absurd lengths to debunk
| bullshit and generally stand for truth is a group-adaptive
| trait.
| alchemio wrote:
| I for one appreciate this article. It sheds light on the history
| of V and its undelivered promises; and save me wasted time trying
| it or reading their site.
| nbittich wrote:
| Interesting article, except I didn't like the last part. It
| sounded too personal. I would have preferred if OP had kept a
| neutral tone and allowed the reader to make their own opinion.
| rozab wrote:
| Seems little has changed since Xe's article back in 2019
|
| https://xeiaso.net/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23/
| ianthehenry wrote:
| Can someone explain the backstory of what V is and why someone
| took the time to write this? To the uninitiated this sounds like
| someone criticizing some kid's side project.
|
| I'm picking up some context clues that V is widely used / famous
| / notable / significant somehow, but the only time I have ever
| heard of it before this is Xe Iaso's similarly negative posts.
| Did V receive some huge funding grant that made it the target of
| ire? Is the author otherwise well-known? What am I missing?
| AndyKelley wrote:
| There is a summary at the top of this post from 2019:
|
| https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-donating-to-musl-libc-proje...
| smcl wrote:
| When the V project started out the creator of V made some big
| claims that raised a few eyeballs, they've gained a reasonable
| following over the years, have a pretty serious looking website
| (https://vlang.io), a beer-money level Patreon following and
| some corporate partnerships/sponsors. However they have
| experienced some pretty brutal takedowns over the years, with
| some of the bolder claims about the language/compiler often
| being exposed as untrue and some functionality being broken.
|
| A word I keep seeing in relation to V is "aspirational" - the
| project aspires to be a serious language and it aspires to have
| some serious features, so I think it's fair to approach it with
| a more critical eye than one would a kid's side-project. I
| think HN would have been pretty understanding if they were open
| about the state of the various features and were a little less
| defensive when they encounter articles that review it like a
| Real Language.
|
| If the authors don't want this kind of feedback they can just
| say front-and-centre (or on their FAQ @
| https://github.com/vlang/v/wiki/FAQ) "this is a toy" or "this
| is pre-alpha" or "this is for research purposes". There are
| plenty of projects like this which are open about their intent
| and which don't have posts like this written about them. But I
| don't think that'll happen, so as it stands the pattern will
| continue - someone revisits the language every year or so,
| finds some things that doesn't meet expectations, writes about
| it and we discuss it on HN again.
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