Golang and Rust = Vlang | Hacker News Reader

Golang and Rust = Vlang

github.com

28 pointsfunerr18 comments

New languages are something sorely needed.

However, has Vlang delivered on its promises? There were several heated discussions around that topic in HN.

It seems to be doing much better, has attracted lots of contributors, and is no more mere vaporware but an actual language on GitHub, so there's that...

For me the problem is that the item in the section:

> Key Features of V

> Fast compilation: ≈100k — 1.2 million loc/s

> Performance: within 3% of C

look like facts, but last time I checked it was only a whish list, or some desired properties. They are not backed by benchmarks.

Things are moving so fast you've gotta dig into the Discord chat history to see info here. But yeah, it's achieving its goals.

Detailed analysis of what works and what doesn't: https://christine.website/blog/v-vvork-in-progress-2020-01-0...

What's up with the editorialized submission title?

Did we ever figure out what V's author is trying to sell? The closest I came to a motivation is that they want attention, acclaim, and a cult of personality; y'know, the Wolfram special.

Attention and acclaim (and respect and admiration) are perfectly fine motivators. "Cult of personality" seems "editorialized".

But I didn't put "cult of personality" in the title. I'm talking about [0], specifically:

> [P]lease use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

My question is really for the submitter, although it doesn't look like they're going to come back and explain themselves. V isn't somehow a sum of Go and Rust. Seriously, look at that stupid stupid statement. Consider it in its fullness. Imagine how many small misconceptions about the nature of programming must have been added together in order to get such a pseudoprofound utterance.

Cults of personality are a real problem when it comes to programming languages. By my quick estimates, about half of TIOBE's list of popular programming languages are languages that exist due to a mythologized Great Man (Ruby, Python, C++, PHP, JavaScript) or small conclave of Great Men (C, Go, Swift, Java) having deep insights or understanding of programming. However, there's no serious evidence from outside our system to suggest that any programming language is good, and that should put the entire premise into doubt.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>[P]lease use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

Of thousands of readers on HN, and thousands of people who submit stuff, I'd say a small minority has read or cares to read the submission guidelines. I'm on HN for over 10 years and hardly ever read them, much less having internalized them (not the poster, just saying).

So the "don't editorialize" rule is not that known to everybody as you assume, as to make "self-evident" that someone purposefully violated it. It's more probable that they just posted with a title they liked and didn't know they need to copy over the original one...

I agree with you that the title is dumb.

So? If one is not religiously motivated, I don't see what problem they'll have with someone wanting attention and acclaim, or even a cult of personality. As long as they deliver...

Linus or Guido or even Larry Perl have had both attention, acclaim, and a "cult of personality" and it's been totally possitive...

V looks really promising like something between Go and Rust. but there is still so much work to do, ecosystem are not cheap in terms of resources and community. nice looking "another one" language may be not enough to get succeed

does V do GC like golang or no GC like rust?

oh "There's no garbage collection or reference counting. V cleans everything up during compilation. If your V program compiles, it's guaranteed that it's going to be leak free." but "Unfortunately, this only currently works for basic situations; manual management is required for more complex cases, which are another WIP."

That makes the title of this post more like a "worst of both worlds". Not good marketing.

I read about this or a similar approach before. I've got no idea how they think they'll pull it off without requiring rust like annotations or reducing expressive power to something below TM equivalence. Or "leak free" doesn't mean what I think it does.

well I just git cloned it and ran make and that was it. Very impressive 26k line generated c file: https://github.com/vlang/vc/blob/master/v.c is this the future of C? it's like too dangerous for humans to code it directly. We need langs like this to make C for us. Magic in this file: https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/tools/gen_vc.v

Alex is about to release the autofree functionality: https://discordapp.com/channels/592103645835821068/592842126...

Notice that after it's stable it will be on by default with a `-noautofree` option.

This author is certainly building on his own dreams. As with many other promises and hype he gave..

There has been research on escape analysis, static memory management and all. Even not considering equivalence to halting problem, it has proven basically impossible to manage memory at compile time except very simple programs. This is a reason why rust ownership semantics are so complicated. And still anything complicated will use reference counting for many shared references. (Eg: Linux kernel).

But this guy is not even good at marketing he is doing -- some promises look very shady and comparisons are not apples to apples.

I see how big efforts zig and odin authors made, and the languages are impressive. V is a hyped piece from beginning and this makes the author seem more shadier.

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