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Comment by hybrids | Hacker News Reader

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 (and I mean general in an aggregated way). Of course shelling-out to curl for your download function is a bodge to be fixed, but the language's issues are not merely one specific problem. The author's misrepresentation of the language, of course, hangs overhead upon all of this.

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.

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And you link to the very same thread by another language author that claimed there's no way V could be built in V and JSON decoding is impossible without an AST.

> 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?

Are you advocating for implementing langauges in an AST-less way or are you working towards maturing your language? You don't sound diametrically opposed to ASTs (which are evident in essentially any modern language), so I have to ask why V was not originally implemented with one and why you don't consider it a more important problem.

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...

> Using codegen to handle the JSON stuff is clever, sure, but it certainly makes me uneasy!

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.

> You don't sound diametrically opposed to ASTs (which are evident in essentially any modern language)

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.

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