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Comment by Tozen | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting or telling, because if you read what I posted carefully, I was not insinuating anything about your evaluation. Instead, the point was being made that you probably don't want to be associated with an old evaluation from 3 years ago, which is falsely accusing V of being vaporware, and where the author and the developer of V clearly have beefs with each other.

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Good news: I'm never going to write about V again: https://xeiaso.net/blog/against-toxicity-programming-languag...

I don't see how that follows? That blog post basically says "don't be toxic about languages". Unless you're using a much broader definition of "toxic" than I'd expect, that doesn't mean you can't write about languages, including fair critiques and even comparisons. I mean, take... "old school" PHP. By all accounts, PHP used to have a lot of sharp edges (in the sense that it was easy to "cut yourself" on it and accidentally do something bad). This was a legitimate, valid problem. It didn't mean that PHP was irredeemably bad, it didn't mean that a dev was A Bad Programmer for writing PHP, but it was true. You can discuss languages, even comparing them to others and pointing out flaws where they exist, without being "toxic" about it.

A lot of that post is actually me wanting to be sure that my legacy isn't one of perceived toxicity. When you are in as many minority groups as I am, then you end up becoming an unpaid existential ambassador and you need to be hyper careful to not look like an asshole or do things that could possibly make you look like an asshole because people will assume that being an asshole is a representative sample of those groups. It is not, but logic is not this species' strong suit.

Plus, writing about how V is outright lying in its documentation gets boring because it's too easy. There's no real nuance or the like to it. It's someone overpromising and underdelivering, and then you also get the V cult going after you and sending so much hatemail. It's not worth it.

Okay, fair; those are good reasons. I don't think those fall under the "toxic" label, but they stand on their own regardless.

(Not meant as an attack. I suspect that I might be splitting hairs too finely here; I can be a little overenthusiastic about terminology. If so, sorry.)

Hate mail? Really? Care to post an example?

Hate mail is fairly typical in these circumstances. So is people asking for evidence. The possible next stages are also predictable:

1. They don't post it, and get accused of lying.

2. They post one of the tamer examples, and get accused of overreacting to nothing.

3. They post a median example, and get told that people reacting with vigour is normal and it's not about them.

4. They post a very strong example, hurting some readers and get responses claiming that you clearly can't take threats at face value.

5. They get accused of making it up, anyway.

6. They don't include personal details, so you can't do anything, anyway.

7. They include personal details and get accused of doxxing or making it personal.

There's just no good outcome from your request.

Yes, there is a good possible outcome - they post it, we see it, and then, if possible, we take corrective actions.

Especially after writing "people will assume that being an asshole is a representative sample of those groups. It is not, but logic is not this species' strong suit."

=> xena does acknowledge, that most people will assume that the whole V community is hateful, and even then, used terms like "V cult" and "hatemail".

Accusing an entire community of people of hate, for the actions of a single one, is not nice at all, especially, when it is done without evidence, with just vague descriptions.

Have you considered, that in all these, it may be the V developers, that are in the minority???

Implying here that any post about V is necessarily going to be toxic, because there aren’t any nice things to be said about it?

Any post criticising V is seen as toxic by their supporters, apparently. You can see many examples of this in this thread.

Well if you really felt that way I think you'd take any toxic programming articles down. They are etched into your GitHub at this point, so people will still reference them if eager... But at least taking that action of pulling such posts off your website will speak volumes about your character and standing by your words. Otherwise it's just more lip-service; not much different than Alex's lip-service you draw attention to.

What do you mean "falsely accusing"? Looks like Xe's blog was correct, V was vaporware back than.

According to this post, it still kinda is.. At least the most interesting parts like unique memory management is 100% vaporware.

It wasn't vaporware back then, it isn't now.

Here's a 1.5 year old demo of V's autofree working:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB8ea8uLsM

Your demo includes code that uses manual memory management because of autofree bugs.

https://github.com/vlang/ved/blob/9b85e6291c9fe9135db1e300de...

Again!! Same video you've been throwing on whoever asks about "autofree", knowing very well that it doesn't work.

I asked this question before and was banned on discord, do you have control flow graph analysis anywhere in V? If not, how do you suppose your autofree engine would work flawlessly?

Nobody bans for questions.

And the video I posted proves that it works. Keeping saying "it doesn't work" is ridiculous.

Also, we now have an operating system Vinix, which uses autofree. Does that work as a proof for you or is that also not enough?

And that's why vinix [1] is full of manual free calls? That tells how good autofree is, isn't it? Can you compile v compiler with autofree? Last time I checked, you can't.

[1] https://github.com/vlang/vinix/search?q=free&type=code

Because surprise it's 0.2, and autofree has bugs, can you imagine?

Nowhere from homepage you get the clue that it's 0.2, do you?

It says 0.2 right there in the center of the home page, under the big "The V Programming Language"

You can actually compile the V compiler with -autofree.

The resulting executable however does segfault - try it with:

    ./v -autofree -o x cmd/v
    ./x version

You seem to talk a lot about things, that you are not well informed about.

> The resulting executable however does segfault

Doesn't give lot of confidence that it works, does it?

> You seem to talk a lot about things, that you are not well informed about.

Unlucky for you, it's not discord, you can't ban me here. So freaking deal with it.

I have never banned people on any platform.

Letting them speak and reveal how vile they are is better in my experience.

And how did you conclude that author is "falsely" making any accusation? Is it similar to your last claim (1) that V doesn't have "null" (which has been debunked)?

(1): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31084446

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