Nitpicking one liners like that from a huge one man project that has just been released is ridiculous.
Luckily the language continues to grow at a rapid pace despite all clickbait vaporware articles.
I never understood that mentality without having some personal connection to the topic or a deep understanding of the topic.
I see the [wip] progress labels all over the site now, I guess some people need it to be explicitly labeled before the give a full break down of what you've made!
A lot of the criticism of V takes aim at how the language was advertised which strikes a lot of people as rightfully annoying in the "C++ killer" space, something that a lot of people have put a lot of hard work already into which should not be entirely out of hand (this space is becoming very crowded for attention). If V's code remained the same at launch with its author choosing to be a little more conservative and thoughtful with its announcement, this type of response would not have happened. Its author did not make the status of the language entirely clear. When Odin came out a year ago, Lobster half a year ago, Zig three years ago, or Mun a month ago (of whom its authors were considerably modest: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173822), sure, they were critiqued, but they were not met with the specific kind of response V had for a reason.
Keep in mind languages (that don't aim to be toys) should rightfully be subject to a greater degree of criticism as their goals are primarily to upend a domain in such a way that if they fail, it renders the efforts of a lot of other people writing code in that language as something for naught. People take gambles when they adopt new technologies in general, but languages (maybe operating systems by extension) are of a significantly different scope.
https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/35
I don't want to discount all of the work people have put into V. It is clear that they have made considerable progress since earlier this year and I commend them for pushing the language into a more usable state. Nevertheless, I still retain a considerable degree of skepticism.
> Claims to "being able to now compile itself in 0.09 seconds" whilst pushing the need for an AST to the side represents a serious problem in the language's general direction
Critique for focusing on fast compilation times? :)
Any valid criticism?
Using codegen to handle the JSON stuff is clever, sure, but it certainly makes me uneasy! It gives a very Jenga Tower impression of the state of the project...
Why? That thread seems to talk about this in the context of serialization and the way your parent poster is proposing is pretty common in the microprocessing world since dynamic parsing would be wasteful and, given fixed data structure, can be unnecessary in some cases.
Honestly, the most interesting thing to me as an outsider in that whole github issue you posted is how much mudslinging and animosity seems to be going around in the PL development community. It's not like people are forced to use alpha releases of random programming languages popping up on github.
Fwiw, I'm not sure what you mean by AST in the context, but if you're talking about an actual in-memory AST, there's (once again) research in getting rid of it for compilation.
Not even on the internet. Have an idea, people reflexively shit on it.
When I see an idea unless it's utterly broken I try to figure out how you make it work. Not pat oneself on the back for coming up with some trite reason why it won't.
Indeed.
These [wip] labels were there before this vaporware article :)
Only a day or two at most according to archive.org. No WIP labels on 2019-06-21 (the closest snapshot available before the article was published)[1]. WIP labels exist on 2019-06-24 (the closest snapshot to the articles date)[2].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190621013937/https://vlang.io/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/