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Comment by lifthrasiir | Hacker News Reader

> He's collecting $927/month on Patreon by deceiving generous and hopeful programmers.

Oh my. This is alarming. I have never thought that the author was already getting that much money out of this incomplete piece of software.

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He's up to 56% of the income I make on Patreon for Zig, and I've been busting my ass for years, working on solving a lot of the same problems, except it's been open source the whole time, and I only ever put claims on ziglang.org that describe actual status quo available software. It's really disheartening that such dishonest tactics are so effective.

Don’t get disheartened. You are writing actual software. He is a scam artist.

So true... I'm also thinking what's the point to open source under the umbrella of this V programming language something that is no more than a couple of examples.

I couldn’t see much code in his github so I assume it’s all smoke and mirrors.

How does this even get voted so high here? Just on the claims?

Because the author is simultaneously working on the Volt IM [1] and the language to make Volt? I can't really say about Volt as I haven't used it, but it is enough to establish that some concrete development is in progress. But you can't really sell an incomplete programming language in this way.

[1] https://volt-app.com/

What does working on multiple projects has to do with code availability?

Because Volt must have been written in V (please let me know if a counterevidence exists), V must have been at least mature enough to write Volt. I'm pretty sure that V does exist at this stage, but that doesn't convince me that it is viable, nor that it can get that much money.

>Because Volt must have been written in V (please let me know if a counterevidence exists)

The source of V or any substantial V project haven't been released, and the author making inaccurate claims about the compiler (and taking donations on Patreon, by the way.) Why should we accept without skepticism that (closed source app) was written with (closed source language)?

Have you ever analyzed the released Volt binary? It has symbols like this:

    000000010001dc30 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_1
    000000010001eba0 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_10
    00000001000219a0 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_100
    [...snip...]
    000000010004bae0 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_462
    000000010002a430 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_463
    0000000100037940 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_464
    000000010001f2f0 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_465
    0000000100020220 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_47
    0000000100020240 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_48
    00000001000202b0 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _f_49
    [...snip...]
    00000001000182a0 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_add
    000000010001a110 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_all_after
    000000010001a020 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_all_before
    000000010001a090 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_all_before_last
    0000000100019ef0 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_at
    0000000100018540 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_clone
    0000000100018aa0 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_contains
    0000000100018610 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_cstr
    0000000100019470 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_ends_with
    0000000100018b30 g       0f SECT   01 0000 [.text] _string_eq

While you can always mangle symbols, it is strange that i) every symbol is in public and ii) only some of them are mangled. Therefore I think the binary was probably produced by V's C transpiler, with some V standard library functions slapped on them.

(I had to rewrite the reply because I later realized that the binary was packed with UPX, I should have thoroughly inspected strings. Sorry for inconvenience.)

yeh, smoke and mirrors. Checking all the websites the author is maintaining, the focus is on Patreon support, much less on real development and commitment. I'm also intrigued why such projects (which does not have any code openly available behind) are so high rated. I assume because many github users does not take the effort to see behind.

And that's not his only patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/vlang is the one in question

but he also has https://www.patreon.com/voltapp

Nice scam.

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