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Comment by lazypenguin | Hacker News Reader

V and it's creator get a lot of flack here on HN and the criticisms are probably warranted. However, I personally enjoy seeing them out here hustling and really trying to make their language succeed despite all the shortcomings. As someone who skews more apathetic, I enjoy seeing people driven by so much passion.

Now, it's time for me to be one of those critics! It's easy to promote the speed and size of your github alternative when it has a fraction of the features. I'll be curious to see where this goes and I think it has some value but only as a way to dogfood V itself.

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> V and it's creator get a lot of flack here on HN and the criticisms are probably warranted.

Hi fellow Penguin :D!

I'm impressed by the creator's dedication here too, but he's clearly biting off more then he can chew - he's been saying that he's making a

* Web framework * GUI framework * SQL ORM * A language that has a lot of promises - seriously checkout their list. * Github alternative * VIM alternative

This stuff is awesome as a project, but each one of these have teams of dedicated engineers sponsored by many companies to hammer out issues and make them as robust as possible. And while he certainly has working demo's of each, they're demos. There's a huge difference between a POC and a robust framework.

A half baked framework is useless sadly, I think he's spreading himself too thin while have a roadmap that looks like a programmer's christmas list.

As the author states, he is not working alone as the following shows:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impa...

When you have a large number of people in Zone 2 and nobody in Zone 1, this is a very good sign that effort is being fairly distributed. And if you look at the activity for the last year:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=comm...

it is extremely active with 98% days active. And if I had to guess, I would say there are at least 5-7 people working on this full time based on the following:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=cont...

Full Disclosure: I'm the creator of the tool with the insights above.

Not full time, but 5-15 hours/week.

Hey thanks for the insight. It looks like they are pretty productive hours then.

I'm not working on these alone :)

While your here, thank you for the awesome work on the V language!

It pretty much has the (for me, subjectively) ideal features of a small, fast, and static programming language. I've been following it for a while and I'm pretty sure I'll find a good use for it soon!

Thanks! Glad you like it :)

I knew vlang from Volt, been waiting for 3+ years. I agree with some of the parent comment.

But I hold no grudge for you, keep up the spirit and good work.

I hope the project went well

Also

* package manager

* operating system

I think it's good test of lang features

i was annoyed by the hyperbolic ambitious claims but if the guy and his friends pour out solid code then there's nothing else to say :)

also they seem to aim at frugal fat free programming, i cannot not like that

Those that lie often either don't respect other people or they don't have the ability to know when they are lying. Which is scarier?

Go, Nim, and Zig have similar focuses and their devs have put in years of public, good work.

Some of the take downs at the time he was making his initial claims are absolutely brutal and make it clear that he not only couldn't back up his crazy claims, he wasn't getting the small stuff right.

https://christine.website/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23

He still hasn't learned.

Some points in that page don't seem like valid criticism. Like, complaining that the compiler is not "zero dependency" on Linux, because it depends on glibc?

Also, allocating a fixed 1000 byte region at the start of a program is not a "memory leak". In fact even glibc has tons of such "initial fixed cost" allocations - IIRC valgrind has built-in "suppression file" to ignore these allocations. (It would be a memory leak if the compiler allocated new 1000 byte chunks every time println is called, but the article doesn't demonstrate it so I guess I'll never know.)

IIRC one of the original claims was to skip libc and do syscalls manually, like Go used to do on Linux.

So listing it makes sense in that context.

That sounds more like a bugfix. Doing syscalls manually is a rather perverse exercise, which go thoroughly proved.

No, this was never claimed.

Hardly an unbiased article:

> V can be bootstrapped in under a second by compiling its code translated to C with a simple cc v.c No libraries or dependencies needed.

Git is a dependency, which means perl is a dependency, which means a shell is a dependency, which means glibc is a dependency, which means that a lot of other things (including posix threads) are also dependencies. Pedantically, you could even go as far as saying that you could count the Linux kernel, the processor being used and the like as dependencies, but that's a bit out of scope for this.

==============

Ridiculous and unnecessary nitpicking.

Also benchmarking the language with a debug build, using a slower backend, and while running vfmt.

Here's a better benchmark: V compiling itself in 0.3 seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc

So if it was a release build from the time, there wouldn't have been massive memory leaks, she would have been able to compile 1.2 million LoC per core per second, V would have only used 400kb of space to compile itself, and the curl binary wouldn't have been used for the download_file function? I agree that there's a cutoff where Linux dependencies don't really count as dependencies in this case.

This is great. I try to have an objective discussion about whether or not Christine's critique is fair, get no response, and am downvoted by who I assume are V lang fanboys. Not improving my impression of the language.

It's important to sort out these lies (and apologize for them if they were, in fact, lies) because no company will use a product they can't trust to do what it says. Though it's all at V lang's own peril I suppose.

The rest of her blog posts on V

https://christine.website/blog/series/v

I'm the author of that post if anyone has any questions.

Yeah let’s bash on V again instead of celebrating what this post is about: a really great web app.

Maybe it is time to move on to more productive discussions. People are obviously building pretty interesting things with V.

Calling this "a really great"web app is a significant stretch. It's an extremely bare bones clone of GitHub. Another case of over promising and under delivering from the V team.

I would like to believe Gitly is a really great web app. The problem is, how can I trust the claims that have been made about Gitly, when I have reason to distrust the group making the claims?

Christine's blog posts indicate V lang is blatantly over promising and under delivering. You can't claim a language is memory safe, when it has trivial memory safety issues. You can't claim a language compiles 1.2m LoC in a second, when it takes about 3 seconds to compile 50k LoC. If they said these are the goals for the language in the future, that's a different story but they did not say that. This was 2 years ago, so maybe things have changed and V lang is no longer over promising, but I don't have the stats on hand to back it up and so I remain skeptical. I like the idea of Gitly but I can't trust it does all they claim right now, given V lang's past.

If you have any stats on V lang fixing these issues, I'd honestly love to see them. Being able to deliver on all of these promises, would make V lang an extraordinary achievement.

I read that article, maybe .. maybe they wised up during the last 2 years.

It's a very large amount for the most talented person to learn, much less build multiple production-grade systems with.

We all should get some grace ofc, but does he also not need to show that he's learned not to make exaggerated claims? Otherwise there is no accountability and someone else gets fucked because they run across a bug because the dev didn't know use valgrind while claiming no memory leaks. I can't like that.

How many people would love to get their service on HN for a few hours?

> if the guy and his friends pour out solid code then there's nothing else to say :)

Unfortunately, they don't.

is gitly yet another imaginary revolution ? (honest question)

Is gitly supposed to be solid code?

it was a hypothetical

> It's easy to promote the speed and size of your github alternative when it has a fraction of the features.

I could have said that about Gogs years ago since a high school student made that in their spare time.

Once projects become open-source, the community usually takes over that work. Just like many others, the same could happen to this project, just like how interested contributors did so with the V language as soon as that was open-sourced.

Can you perhaps link to some of said criticism? I'd be interested to read it.

Here is a nice mini series of blog posts about V https://christine.website/blog/series/v

Don’t forget this one: https://christine.website/blog/OVE-20190623-0001

I wouldn’t even for a second using web-facing services from someone with a security track record this bad.

The best bit is this excerpt from the standard library (2019):

  fn download_file(url, out string) {
      // println('\nDOWNLOAD FILE $out url=$url')
      // -L follow redirects
      // println('curl -L -o "$out" "$url"')
      os.system2('curl -s -L -o "$out" "$url"')
      // res := os.system('curl -s -L -o "$out" "$url"')
      // println(res)
  }

Here's what that file looks like today: https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/vlib/net/http/downloa...

No, this file is no longer used.

We have a fully working net module:

https://github.com/vlang/v/tree/master/vlib/net/http

In that case, you ought to be mocked for making a mess of the repository by keeping unused files in it.

Come on, that's just mean.

I don't really understand the negativity against V; is there something wrong with setting crazy goals if you're actually working towards them?

Why should anyone be mocked for anything? How is that conducive to the conversation?

You should rethink how you convey your ideas, IMO.

I really don't understand why everyone is making fun of what is clearly a stub implementation. Have we not all written code like this so we can go work on some other part of the code that depends on this?

The people that are making fun of V, instead of helping, at this point are nothing more than hateful jerks imho.

They just want to hate something - if not V, it would be something else.

Most of us also don't splash it all over hn/reddit like it's the second coming of Christ.

You're early obsessed and make it a large portion of your existence to hate something with such a deep passion.

It's astonishing.

Frankly it's rather amusing.

Most of us also do not name ourselves based on things we hate...

I don't get it, is that file's function bodies just comments now? Or does /* */ not mean a comment in V?

Meh. I have some issues with the criticisms there, but they make some okay points too.

I don't see this as a reason to dismiss the entire language though. I've seen more damning arguments against Go, Rust, Zig, etc.

The languages you've listed generally work as advertised and while you might dislike some of the design decisions or tradeoffs inherent in those decisions, ultimately, they do what they claim to.

The same cannot be said of V.

You say that and then do nothing to back it up.

This HN User has been quite outspoken on his criticism: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vlang1dot0

Some can be found in every thread about the project: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

>It's easy to promote the speed and size of your github alternative when it has a fraction of the features.

At leat this fraction of features works, what can't be said about gitlab and is only partially true for github. It shows repos, files, commits and what not, what features are missing?

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