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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

Just so everyone is aware, this is more of a toy language that the author makes considerably bold claims about. His benchmarks exaggerate by comparing the speed of print statements, and the language itself is essentially a transpilation (a direct rule based conversion without an AST) to x86 so no other platforms can be supported. He has of yet to actually release any source code so this is just based off of the comments of his I’ve tracked down. If you’re familiar with the author of Iris in Go, this guy is basically that but for a programming language.

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> the language itself is essentially a transpilation (a direct rule based conversion without an AST) to x86 so no other platforms can be supported.

Hmmm I'm not sure if this is true but he says that "V can compile to (human readable) C, so you get the great platform support and optimization of gcc and Clang."[0]

[0] https://github.com/vlang-io/V#run-everywhere

Well we have no idea what it can actually do or how it works because it’s not open source. Based on comments I found while researching him, the code is directly translated to the target language with no intermediary representation, so essentially the backends are hard coded and no optimazations take place.

Detailed information about compilation, optimisation, etc is available on the home page and in the docs.

If you need optimization, for now you have to emit C. Like the website says, in the future V will be able to emit optimized machine code.

V will be open sourced this June.

Care to point me to your detailed information on your compiler and what your optimizations are?

https://vlang.io

Where on your site? Where does it actually talk about how your compiler works in detail and the optimizations it’s running?

Ctrl + F "optimiz"

Transpilation is compilation. Let's stop the gatekeeping.

>Just so everyone is aware, this is more of a toy language that the author makes considerably bold claims about.

Yeah, so? Do you think you have some unique insight, that you have to plaster all over this thread 20 times? Say it and be done with it.

We don't think it's the new production ready language from Microsoft or Google either...

>His benchmarks exaggerate by comparing the speed of print statements, and the language itself is essentially a transpilation (a direct rule based conversion without an AST) to x86 so no other platforms can be supported.

If a language has a good enough syntax and semantics, that's totally find with me.

I could not give less fucks for non x86 platforms, especially at such an early stage of a language's development.

That said, it also says it supports transpiring to C, in which case the whole point of "not supporting other platforms" is moot.

Hi,

This is definitely not a toy language. Right now it can emit x64 machine code, more platforms will be available after the open-source release in early June.

We will see once you release the source code, but for now maybe tone down the language on your site and in your comments. Of course your code is going to compile faster if you don’t support any platforms or optimizations. If you’re really serious about building a programming language I suggest porting V to llvm IR so you can focus on the parts you’re obviously more interested in.

The website doesn't claim V does optimization in the fast builds. On the opposite, everything is explained very clearly.

Supporting more platforms will not make compilation slower.

> I suggest porting V to llvm IR

No thanks :) I'd like to keep 1.5 million loc per second.

It's his website, he can do whatever he wants. You are not a paying customer. Stop being a choosing beggar.

>Of course your code is going to compile faster if you don’t support any platforms or optimizations.

And that's fine too. I don't want support for some BS platform slow down the platform 90% of people and servers use.

Perhaps add ARM to x86, but that's it.

If this is thr case, this post should be flagged for misinformation.

If what is the case? What's the misinformation?

It’s intentionally misleading. He might not be outright lying, but he is either too ignorant or intentionally leaving out that his compiler is essentially just a front end with no back end.

The only one misleading here is you.

Then show us your source code. Explain how your compiler works. Your website has zero information outside of your front end targets.

Like all projects that say "we will release soon".

Your point being? Even if he's misleading people, people can always JUDGE by themselves and not give him money.

(As if he gets anything -- even established projects with tons of supporters and huge communities hardly make $1000/month on donations).

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