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.