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Comment by nv-vn | Hacker News Reader

Having your own language can increase productivity. The compiler took 2 weeks according to OP. Also the fast compile times definitely help. This is also a project only OP is working on so number of contributors doesn't matter, and even then it's stupidly simple to learn any C-like language if you know one already. If this works for OP then it's definitely not a waste of time really.

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It is an extra ordinary feat that the OP took only couple of weeks to create a working programming language. I always thought it takes years to create a new language. It will be interesting hear from OP, how he could create a new language in couple of weeks

A programming language is a translation scheme. If you know your scheme upfront, it's trivial to translate. C-like languages are easier to translate to binaries because well, C is glorified assembly. The analysis parts may take longer, but when you start writing a language you don't need to do much analysis, especially when writing a C-like language. Parsing can be automated, and given a clean grammar like Go's it's trivial to parse

I already agreed that this makes sense for a hobby projecr, which is what it sounds like you're describing.

How many useful projects never have more than one developer?

What is more likely to boost productivity: good tooling (including incremental compilation) or custom-tailored syntax?

Syntax is important, but obsession about syntax (to the point of rejecting hundreds of existing languages) is bikeshedding.

It's not about syntax. I knew that "why another language" would be a very common question, so I'll add an answer to the landing page of V's website :)

Basically none of the existing languages have the features that I need:

1) Compilation speed. V compiles 15 million lines of code per second. Only Go and Delphi are relatively fast.

2) Simplicity & maintainability. Only Go is simple. I made V even simpler and stricter.

3) No runtime/GC. I want the language to be close to metal so that it can be used to develop small and fast native apps, games, drivers, etc. Go's out.

4) Safety. Go has nil (runtime errors), no option types (verbose error checks and unhandled errors), data races, global variables.

5) Easy interop with C. Cgo ads a lot of overhead.

Thanks for all your hard work so far. Really looking forward to its release!

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