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Comment by amedvednikov | Hacker News Reader

200 KB native Slack client. A polished public beta will be finally released on Feb 7. Also supports Skype, Twitter, Telegram... almost everything.

It was delayed by 9 months. Sorry to thousands of people who have been subscribed and waiting for news.

I'll release a detailed post explaining what I've been working on and what caused the delay.

Also super excited about the language I created to develop Volt. Compiles 15 million lines of code per second and can be translated to from C/C++. I've successfully ported DOOM and (almost) DOOM 3 while making build time 120 times faster.

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200 KB, now that's more like what a chat client should take! Even excluding the browser "runtime" I think Slack's JS itself is bigger than that.

I say this as someone who wrote a 20KB MSNP8 (MSN Messenger) client for personal use many years ago --- it's not that hard to keep your code size down and performance up, even if you custom-draw everything so it looks like the browser Slack client.

May I ask, since I noticed your username, if you are Russian? It seems a lot of other non-bloated tools I use come from Russian programmers...

Yes, I am :) Might be a cultural thing. We like simple and efficient solutions.

> so I spent two weeks in October 2017 to create a very light and minimalistic language that can seamlessly interop with C

> V compiler is written in V.

> can be translated to from C/C++. An automatic translator supports the latest standards of these languages.

> incremental build system,

Wow, that's incredibly fast. Self-hosted in 2 weeks? Hot code reloading? This is everything I plan to do with Zig, but apparently done already. How did you do it so quickly?

Hi Andy,

I wrote the original version in Go in 2 weeks. Half a year later I spent 2-3 weeks to re-write it in V. It's very small.

I just want to mention that the download links don't work yet (I'm assuming since you have not launched) but they look like they should work. You should have some indication on the webpage as well. Very interested in this product after skype finally forced the upgrade to the electron version a week ago. Can't wait to try it out. Thanks and all the best

edit totally missed the "coming soon"...

This is really interesting and I'd be excited to use it if the memory usage is even half that of the official Slack client. Bookmarked.

Right now it has ~10% of Slack's usage for the same chats.

Not surprising. Hopefully this helps rebut people who say things like that Slack has to be that big because its complicated and caches messages for performance.

Your language has been submitted to Hacker News here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19086712

Just letting you know in case you want to respond to comments, including mine. ;)

It's so mean to give us big juicy download links below a little grey `(coming soon)` =)

Is that mailing list for Volt also the place to find out more about V the language? It sounds and looks really interesting!

For now yes. I'll create a separate website and communities for V in April.

Where can I read about this language?

I found this page on the site https://volt.ws/lang but it's quite thin on detail.

I really wanted to like this (remember when it was called Eul and built with Go, even recommended it to friends and coworkers) - I spent months following the GitHub repo, looking forward to seeing the code I imagined would inspire the Go community.. but the author sadly do certain things that comes off as untrustworthy, such as promising to open source but failing to do so even after a year, renaming the project without warning/announcement, letting the homepage redirect to spam (possibly malware), tons of AV (hopefully falsely) flagging the apps, etc.

.im domains need to be renewed 3 days before expiration. I had a bad habit of renewing my domains 1-2 days before the deadline. So I lost it. Lesson learned.

I decided to change the name to Volt and set up a redirect to volt.ws 1 month before expiration.

This should have been announced, yes.

AV were flagging the app because I compressed it with UPX, which I no longer do, and because it wasn't signed (it is now).

But in general yes, huge delays and not much communication from my part. That's not going to happen any more, I'll post a detailed blog about it.

I don't see how you owe any explanation to a non-paying client. Please don't feed the freeloaders. They always set new standards.

Is there any documentation on the language? Is it something akin to Zig? [https://ziglang.org/]

There's some info here: https://volt.ws/lang

Some ideas are similar, yes.

>It was delayed by 9 months

reasons? why wouldn't i expect the same going forward in the future? 9 month delay on a closer source app=no for me ever using it

also your download links don't work, way to clickbait people into signing up for your email list

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