V Language Review(mawfig.github.io) |
V Language Review(mawfig.github.io) |
I tried V when it first got popular (about 3 years ago). I am no expert on languages but the way it was ductaped (AST-less compiler for "performance", a "graphic library" when even basic things don't work etc etc) made me eventually lose interest.
3 years later V is still mostly where I left it. If the V author focused on the stabilizing the compiler instead of starting off shoot projects like vui, vdb etc. it might actually work.
Is that obvious? Yes, if I put on my cynical hat it pattern matches a money-grab or some other sort of fraud, but if I put on my charitable-interpretation hat V also perfectly pattern matches my idea of "solo developer wants to create the perfect language and goes after it with fresh eyes and a lot of enthusiasm (and yes, does get slowed down when it comes to fleshing out every little detail correctly and fully)". How do you distinguish?
It's especially prevalent in indie gaming and large Kickstarters. Some are actually scams, but a lot are just entirely out of their depth and realize this too late/only when their deadlines come due. And yet there are content creators which just make video after video just shitting on these people. Quiet sad all around.
(Though that link from the sister comment does make it look quiet bad in this case. Projects that just make great sounding claims about the current state of the project, even though none of it is true can't be taken seriously in my opinion.)
In the case of V it's not only about details. Memory management, for example, is a fundamental part of a programming language and not something you can do as an afterthought. It is still not clear at all how memory management works in V.
Note- just by being a strong Go alternative by itself, one can see possible "behind the scenes" conflicts and motives. Though both V and Odin really should be fully embraced, because they continue the direction and changes in thinking started by Go, while providing features that such users might crave or have wanted.
V has been more successful than other newer programming languages at getting sponsors and supporters (check V's GitHub or vlang.io), to include publicity, both very good and at times negative (which appears to include angry detractors). It also has been developing at a more rapid pace than other languages in its category.
From looking at the history, some of the controversy appears to come from years ago and whether or not the language was real or was going to be released, because it was already "advertising" itself and had sponsors. Keep in mind that other languages have a very hard time at getting sponsors, supporters, or users. So, that another language getting what they are not able to or feel they deserve, can become a source of conflict as well.
My opinion is that the V creator did nothing wrong, because it was a very smart decision to attract sponsors and users, and the creator did release the language. This alone already separated V from the many languages we never know or hear about, the ability to get enough sponsors and supporters to sustain growth and momentum.
Yeah, it's might seem great to be a solo developer making what he/she feels is the perfect language as a hobby, but at some point the enthusiasm stops or the person realizes what's the point if nobody cares and nobody uses it.
Another aspect of this situation is it appears detractors were running with the narrative that V was "fake" or "vaporware", and then when it was actually released, they had to reset their narratives. You can't claim that something that exists and is used by many, is "fake" or non-existent. So then the attacks appear to then go for whatever might stick. Anything about the language, which is "not perfect" or as they feel is claimed, is then targeted. This is why we have these odd and controversial takedown attempts of a language which is still in alpha and evolving. I'm very much not saying that people shouldn't be criticizing or pointing out flaws, but rather it doesn't need the viciousness or underhandedness of trying to persuade people to stop using or attempts to kill it off.
Ultimately, just don't think that such tactics are going to work, because V has such strong community support and is continually improving. V is well on the path of becoming a very viable and highly useful language.
They were not "clean sheet, let's make a great new language" implementations.
The impression should not be given that V is just a one-man show. Many of the offshoot projects are in collaboration with others, not just the author, who have invested heavily in them and also wanted or helped create them.
V's author is paying others to write things in V (even when basic functionalities don't work as advertised). They don't want to improve the language, they want to create a showcase to attract more funding, that's about it.
She doesn't pull any punches, but I think she was quite prescient in capturing the vibe of the project.
Unfortunately, Vlang isn't a project out of an overeager young dev (not anymore at least), but at the same time, it hurts no-one. Sure, the author is making 1k a month out of it, but it's not like it's the scam of the century making him rich. I see startups on HN lying harder than that every week. Just let the dude make his stuff on his side, have a good laugh when articles like this come out, and that's it. Look at legitimate alternatives like Zig or Odin, and keep V as a fun little distraction when you want to see what overpromising looks like
To be fair, they didn't claim that the values were immutable, only the variables. Isn't the example in the article basically the same as Java's final variables, i.e. immutable references to mutable values?
> No global variables [...] Evaluation: V does not prevent you from creating and mutating globally shared state in any meaningful way.
Although I agree with the evaluation, the claim of "no global variables" might still hold, assuming it refers to mutable global variables. The global constant holds an immutable reference to a mutable value, just like how in Java a singleton object (or a class with mutable static fields) can be used to simulate global variables.
Then I take the liberty of doing some promotion for Oberon+ here too.
Disclaimer: I’ve never actually used it.
Would you mind expanding on your later comment? While I'm not a Go programmer, it's pretty easy for me to see why it has the features it has based on their commitment to fast compile times and being easy to learn. V on the other hand feels like an incoherent list of the biggest buzzwords in the industry right now with no clear overall design.
V’s design address many things I feel are lacking whenever I use Go: nil safety, sum types, option/result types, mandatory error checking. I think V is best understood in the context of being Go++.
Having looked a bit deeper though, the immutability and generics stuff does feel a bit bolted on, so I do see your point.
A good idea indeed, thanks for the effort.
Although I'm quite surprised why V has gained so much attention.
> Disclaimer: I’ve never actually used it.
I can make a hypotethical language as well (I do it all the time), but I wouldn’t make a website about it and give it a name.
Features: * All of the things you want * No things that you don't want
Please donate to my Patreon
For example, the null pointer reference the author demonstrates would not be at all difficult to identify at compile time, it's literally just checking whether any structs are created with pointer properties initialized to 0. Checking for null pointers in all circumstances is much harder, but this particular example is easy. Why claim V supports this when it doesn't? Am I missing something about how hard it'd be to implement?
Pure functions are the hardest of the ones you've identified -- they're nominally easy if you have perfect purity information, but pretty difficult (impossible, in the general case) if you don't or if your definition of "pure" is just plain incorrect (like V's is).
(I don’t care for V one way or the other though, and most of the results in the post are clearly bad, I just find this particular point to be absurd).
https://ocaml.org/docs/functional-programming
> My complaint is that V claims to be pure...
"V is not a purely functional language however." (from V documentation)
https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/doc/docs.md#pure-func...
My goto "test" is doing a simple webscraper and put results in a db.
The above is important and where I(your milage may vary allllot) think many fail or fail to some degree:
Its 2022 your new lang should have above excellent support for:
1) Multicore:(async, csp, threads) I dont care which just that it should be excellent and not some added library
2) We live in a inter-connected work: Thus I require your language to have above excellent support for things like: Http, websockets, json, encryption, auth,dbs etc.
3) Really bring something new or make coding in an alternative a pain. (stupid example: going back to posix threads in c, after coding i. go with channels)
4) Ecosystem:Hit the ground running, dammit if i spend 20 minutes getting a hello world with an external library up its too much ! Looking at you Python having to weave magic spells to get the correct versions and environment just so" is a absolute pain.
5) Pattern matching, immutability, functional, typing: Yea this is where people get very passionate* :) You probably have to include atleast one the above.
That being said my hat and github stars go out to all pl designers ! You at least took a shot and shipped something ! Bloody well done to you all !
Also if you looking to tinker look at janet and joy(web framework based on janet)
PS: Ive tried v in the past and it really was too bad(no program in production yet)
PS2: My dream lang would be lisp-like(more clojure than lisp) that compiles to go ?
https://web.archive.org/web/20191020121218/https://github.co...
Languages such as Nim have took 11 years before reaching 1.0, so V is still doing comparatively well. V's pace of development has been quite fast and substantial. More comparable languages such as Zig and Odin have yet to hit 1.0 as well, and are many years older.
Yes, the pace of development is getting faster and user patience less, but V should still be afforded some leeway in this regard.
> At this time, I would not recommend spending time on V. I would also be very cautious when taking claims made by the authors at face value.
I love it.
I really don't get the purpose of someone exaggerating the capabilities of their language, to the point of outright lies.
At least stick to the current evaluation (or attack), which is more relevant, and make points from there. But, keep in mind that these attacks are on a young language that isn't 1.0 yet, so even with this we are talking about a moving target. The language is still evolving.
People are poking holes in V because its claims are unfounded, not because they've decided they're in competition with the language. A simple "work in progress" sign on the features in question would draw a lot of fire away from the language and its creator.
One reason that people highlight older criticism is because it's useful to examine past behavior, past promises, and contrast them to current behavior and current promises. If V is going to improve its reputation, it's going to do it by (a) making good on the promises it can, (b) coming clean on the promises it can't, and (c) offer a clear win for some distinguishing featureset. Badgering people to shut up about the past isn't on that list.
I'm not touching a language developed by folks who don't see a problem in scamming users, sorry.
This question is answered in the comment you just replied to:
> She doesn't pull any punches, but I think she was quite prescient in capturing the vibe of the project.
I also despise how many people want to shit on this new language before it even takes off. Why are so many people frothing at the chance to disparage this language and it's author? Never seen something like this.
I dont really care about the language. I've tried it a couple times and it's nothing special (to me) so I moved on, but I definitely understand where the hate comes from. The author essentially lied for at least months about his project to get financial support.
Quick edit: to actually add to the discussion, I think the weirdest thing about V is the odd support it does get. Most projects, especially compilers, with as much controversy as V would never get any support. I'm very curious what its proponents are using it for and why they choose V over pretty much any other language.
It's because of all the lying. The author keeps claiming that their language has features that it definitely does not have.
Why do so many people consider "I checked several notable claims, and most of them are false" to be some kind of hateful disparaging attack?
Based on submitted link, they don't.
Something you'll see by reading the overview is the part where the Zig team themselves warn you that Zig is not a fully safe language and link to articles describing the safety boundaries. Scroll to the bottom of this section:
https://ziglang.org/learn/overview/#performance-and-safety-c...
This article criticises V for presenting itself as a usable language, when it definitely isn't, with all these features which don't work.
"At this time, I would not recommend spending time on V. I would also be very cautious when taking claims made by the authors at face value."
Also this point. Why does he recommend people to avoid the language. These people need contributors which help them to improve their language. It is open source. Maybe it is because I'm not native, maybe you are right.
I'm also curious if the author even tried to interact with the community/developers to get his examples to work. I'm not that good of a developer to rate the things he is claiming, so I don't know.
Hopefully he created some bugs on github so the developers have at least the chance to fix the issues he is talking about.
Valid criticisms of the language should arguably be more directed towards its issues on GitHub (https://github.com/vlang/v/issues), in addition to any blog or article, where the contributors and developers can address them.
When approached correctly, and not in an adversarial and combative way, I've seen the V community be very friendly and helpful.
Then when you speak to me you hear me speak Chinese well, then you see I can’t bend pipes nor speak English proficiently.
I presented myself to you and two of my self introduction claims were lies or half lies.
If you then feel like I lied to you then my answer is that I’m studying (Alpha)
This is what V was like 3 years ago and doesn’t seem like it has changed.
Do you have any examples?
How can anyone possibly believe this?? What is the motivation?? V is a `README` full of desires, and a source tree full of incompetence. There is no concrete or technical evidence that can support this optimism. Zig is a serious project. Go is a serious project. Rust is a serious project. V is, obviously, an un-serious project.
I have no horse in the race, and having never seen the controversy, it does seem suspicious that the language author is making money off of claims that simply aren’t true. The amount of stars on GitHub compared to actual activity on comparable repos does indicate that the marketing is working though, the claims being made are taken at face value, not the WIPs that they actually are.
I too can dream of a perfect language, but it doesn’t mean I should put up a website claiming that I’ve actually made it and it’s real.
I care that they claim it has "no undefined behaviour", "as fast as C", "has generics", when these things are simply not true.
To use Ante as an example again, they literally have a checklist in the README, listing what is and isn't implemented yet.
This is why the "critic" can also be interpreted (or misinterpreted) as another attack. It's one thing if this was a blog evaluating the claims of multiple programming languages, but it being a very specific and dedicated critic of V, looks strange.
To include it uses the term "we" a lot in the summary, as if it was a collaboration effort by a group of programmers directed at V. It is unknown who are the "we" being referred to.
"We’re able to create a null pointer (V reference) with no compiler errors or warnings."
"We weren’t able to shadow local variables."
If the evaluation was in the spirit of improving the language (as it is still alpha) or pointing out things that need to be addressed, then one would expect it to be presented as various issues or bugs on V's GitHub. There would not be any blindsiding or surprise, but an exchange between the evaluator(s) and V's developers and contributors.
Parts of the evaluation and summary are debatably subjective. The categories of purity, sum types, generics, speed, and compiling are among them. So getting direct feedback from the developers and contributors of V would have been much more fair and helpful.
He didn't.
What you should do now is to decide what to do with those points instead of arguing. If the decision is WONTFIX (okay to do, not everything can be made into the language) then the advertisement should be updated (ProTip: you should really have done this years ago). If the decision is to do something with that then the advertisement should be still updated, hopefully with a link to the tracking issue. If you are already doing something about that then you still should have a link to the tracking issue. If the point is "misleading", then you should write out clearly why it's misleading, how the author could have concluded in that way (i.e. assume no malice and debug instead), and how to verify your updated claim. With no strings attached.
Honestly though these points have been iterated and reiterated years ago. I had a hope that you have learned (hard) from that past experience; my hope seems not justified.
Like the language compiling itself in <1s? It's true and you can verify it yourself:
And you are slightly altering the very claim you've already said; the OP specificially tests the claim that "V compiles [...] ~1 million (x86 and tcc backends) lines of code per second per CPU core", which I can easily verify on my machine (1m_helloworld.v took 25.5 and 15.5 seconds to compile under the same settings). To be fair these test files are edge cases you can easily dismiss (ProTip: you can make your advertisements more accurate), but edge cases show the weakness of your design and you should not confront them.
What do you mean IM channels?
AFAIK your stated reason for the silence is not accurate. Andy’s criticisms were always based on V making claims that no one could evaluate because it was closed source/unreleased (and then used those claims to solicit money from people). Once V was made open source, those criticisms no longer applied, as things like TFA could be written.
Edit: ack, and I misspelled his name and the edit window closed
The V compiler is self hosting for example, there are useful examples done in the main repo, people are using it for writing web servers.
What it should do, to "qualify", and to qualify in what?
Not sure what you mean. Is it about the fact that all variables are declared in the header of the procedure, i.e. not somewhere in the body as e.g. in C# or Java? This is actually the same with Active Oberon and Modula-3. In case you mean that the order of declarations is relevant, Oberon+ assumes at least a two pass parser by design; a declaration sequence can contain more than one CONST, TYPE and VAR section in arbitrary order, interleaved with procedures, and the order of declaration is not relevant; see e.g. https://github.com/oberon-lang/specification/blob/master/The... and https://oberon-lang.github.io/2021/07/16/comparing-oberon+-w...
As for the source tree full of incompetence - that may be so, if you can help, you are welcome to make PRs to improve it.
As incompetently written as it is, it is capable of compiling itself, and quickly, unlike some others.
> Features indicated to be incomplete/work in progress/unimplemented will be mentioned as such.
Indicating on the vlang.io homepage how much of the language has yet to be realized would go a long way in my opinion.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190624052507/https://vlang.io/
[2]: https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1142503808901308418
Credit to both you and him for the passion and effort put in. I just think his excitement bubbles over into an unfortunate way of communicating (lets call it cute)
Communication is something you're excellent at, in a large part due to your truthfulness
I just think vlang is living in and expressing dreams and visions. Which I agree has problems, but creating a language is an aspirational endeavour
When it comes to sponsors and donations, V is far (really far) from the best in the category. Not to mention that Zig has a proper non-profit foundation, which is a far greater achievement than GitHub stars or even sponsors.
All your comments in this thread are in disagreement with reality to the same absurdist degree of conspiracy theories. And of course you yourself can't help but point out that everything is a conspiracy against V, which is laughable.
And it's laughable to claim that its popularity on launch was due to false advertising. Even your leader admitted that self hosting on launch is impressive:
> Wow, that's incredibly fast. Self-hosted in 2 weeks? Hot code reloading? This is everything I plan to do with Zig, but apparently done already. How did you do it so quickly?
(I hope you won't argue that V wasn't written in V on release.)
Funny how the agenda changed.
If anything, I suppose the urge was too great, to not expose yourself.
I totally agree with kristoff here and also munificent[1]. Y'all have a massive victim complex on grand display in this thread and exhibit the classical signs of projecting your own issues on to everyone else.
Shouldn't be hard, if "most claims" are false according to you.
https://mawfig.github.io/2022/06/18/v-lang-in-2022.html https://xeiaso.net/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23
You can see that V is actually as fast as is claimed on the website:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc
Same with other points from the author that publicly claimed that "V has to die".
Like I said, if "most claims are false" on vlang.io, as you claim, it shouldn't be hard to list 3 of them here.
So we have a situation where the OP created a hit piece with no feedback from V developers or its community, and detractors are elaborating on it, that leaves few other public options to address it.
Indeed you are, but realize that you are also ambassadors for your language, and engaging in petty language war nonsense on public forums doesn’t leave anyone looking great. That’s a problem for V moreso than your detractors, because you are the ones building a reputation for yourselves, while your detractors are relatively anonymous and fungible. They can act anyway they want and it won’t follow them around.
On the other hand, everything said here by Vlangers will stick to V and will be brought up on the next thread. You don’t want the reputation of being fanboys who will descend on any thread about V and zealously argue about it for days. But that’s the reputation you’re building here, and it has nothing to do with the behavior or actions of anyone else. That’s something you are actively choosing to do, and it doesn’t make you or your community look good.
Again, no one looks great in threads like these, but most people here aren’t building a reputation. V is building a reputation. What do the posts by Vlangers here say about V? It’s not exactly a shining advertisement for your community.
Please list the things that were declared finished before even starting on them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB8ea8uLsM
no one has been scammed, whatever that means in opensource development
So, where can I download the version of V with non-nullable references, no uninitialized memory, no mutation without call-site mutability annotations, that can compile 1M loc/sec, and a functional autofree?
(Also, "nowadays" must stretch out to many decades if you're including Java!)
Fearless concurrency.
Java also promised memory safety. I still get Null pointer segfaults in Java code.
As far as I'm concerned, V works as described in their documentation. As with any language, there are some specifics that are subject to interpretation or debate, but that is to be expected.
And, V is not doing anything that other languages also try to do in terms of sponsors and investors to sustain progress, increase popularity, or make improvements.
Really? Can you explain to me how memory management works in V?
Autofree will not be the default until version 0.3 of the language. Autofree inserts free calls during compilation, and the rest is managed by RC. V will be giving users 3 choices: GC, Autofree, or manual. Those people that actually use the language, would already know this.
This is mentioned on both the website and in the documentation, and any confused users can simply ask on discord (https://discord.com/invite/vlang) or the GitHub discussion (https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions).
Aren't you the part of the core team who bans anyone on discord who asks questions about V's memory management?
`const x = foo()`
There's a bug that allows to trick the compiler and modify the const via another variable, it's a one line fix, and will be fixed today.
Global mutable variables are only allowed with `-enable-globals` and are supposed to be used only in low level code, like drivers and kernels.
What does the intended behaviour (after the fix) look like? Are mutable fields in structs disallowed if the struct is pointed to by a const?
`mut x := immutable_var`
https://ocaml.org/docs/functional-programming
"V functions are pure by default, meaning that their return values are a function of their arguments only, and their evaluation has no side effects (besides I/O)."
https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/doc/docs.md#pure-func...
It sure sounds to me like V is trying to claim that functions can be pure while still performing I/O.
The point is “no side effects other than IO” is a useful observation to make about how a language feels to use and the kinds of programs it encourages one to write.
Whether V is a good example of such a language I’ve no idea.
You appear to be unbothered by OCaml describing itself as "mostly pure", whatever such "marketing" truly means, but seem to take strong offense to V. Seems like "mostly pure", in either case, should be equally acceptable or generate equal outrage.
Presumably a purely functional language would, it seems to me, be exclusively (i.e. purely) functional, i.e. the functions in the language would always be pure. A language that has pure functions and impure functions, on the other hand, would not be "purely functional" as it contains impure parts, but it could still contain pure parts as well.
The issue with V seems to be that, although everyone agrees that it contains impure parts and thus is not a "purely functional language", the supposedly "pure functions" are also not actually pure, according to some reasonable definitions of purity.
EDIT:
> which works, but you have to know what you are doing
This does not feel very convincing...
> Copyright 2012-2022 Xe Iaso (Christine Dodrill).
[correction] on their GitHub page I see: Please call me (order of preference): Xe/xer, They/them or She/her please.
[edit] obscure to have your pronoun also be your name (or maybe your title?). Or maybe it is all just satire, given: "I am an ordained minister with the Church of the Latter-day Dude. This allows me to officiate religious ceremonies in at least the United States." - https://dudeism.com
I'm also quite seriously an ordained minister.
The whole point of a person's name is to sufficiently differentiate them from the other persons. Using pronoun as name (or vice versa) just totally negates this goal.
At this point, all of it is basically designed to further confuse and only create a very monthly chaotic outcome for everyone.
> extraordinary claims failed V.
I asked you to list such claims. You fail to do so.
There's no way it takes 15s to compile 1m_helloworld.v. You're probably using a debug build of V.
What's your hardware? CPU/SSD.
You don't have to guess because I can give you my log. I have exactly followed what the OP did, except for more recent revision because I couldn't get it compiled in my environment.
$ git clone https://github.com/vlang/v/
$ cd v
$ git checkout 0e4198f23b2b9a52d72f61dd40d019412b809791
$ VFLAGS="-prod" make
make fresh_vc
make[1]: Entering directory '/tmp/v'
rm -rf ./vc
git clone --depth 1 --quiet --single-branch https://github.com/vlang/vc ./vc
make[1]: Leaving directory '/tmp/v'
cd ./vc && git clean -xf && git pull --quiet
make fresh_tcc
make[1]: Entering directory '/tmp/v'
rm -rf ./thirdparty/tcc
git clone --depth 1 --quiet --single-branch --branch thirdparty-linux-amd64 https://github.com/vlang/tccbin ./thirdparty/tcc
make[2]: Entering directory '/tmp/v'
make[2]: Leaving directory '/tmp/v'
make[1]: Leaving directory '/tmp/v'
cd ./thirdparty/tcc && git clean -xf && git pull --quiet
cc -std=gnu99 -w -o v1.exe ./vc/v.c -lm -lpthread
./v1.exe -no-parallel -o v2.exe -prod cmd/v
./v2.exe -o ./v -prod cmd/v
rm -rf v1.exe v2.exe
Note: building an optimized binary takes much longer. It shouldn't be used with `v run`.
Use `v run` without optimization, or build an optimized binary with -prod first, then run it separately.
Note: `tcc` was not used, so unless you install it yourself, your backend
C compiler will be `cc`, which is usually either `clang`, `gcc` or `msvc`.
These C compilers, are several times slower at compiling C source code,
compared to `tcc`. They do produce more optimised executables, but that
is done at the cost of compilation speed.
V has been successfully built
V 0.2.4 0e4198f
$ cat > t.sh && chmod a+x t.sh && ./t.sh > 1m_helloworld.v
#!/bin/bash
echo 'fn main() {'
for i in {3..1000000}
do
echo ' println("hello world")'
done
echo '}'
$ time ./v 1m_helloworld.v
parsed 100000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 200000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 300000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 400000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 500000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 600000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 700000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 800000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 900000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
real 0m14.929s
user 0m6.516s
sys 0m8.031s
$ mv thirdparty/tcc/tcc.exe thirdparty/tcc/tcc.exe.orig
$ time ./v 1m_helloworld.v
parsed 100000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 200000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 300000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 400000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 500000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 600000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 700000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 800000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
parsed 900000 statements so far from fn main.main ...
==================
cc: internal compiler error: Killed (program cc1)
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-7/README.Bugs> for instructions.
...
==================
(Use `v -cg` to print the entire error message)
builder error:
==================
C error. This should never happen.
This is a compiler bug, please report it using `v bug file.v`.
https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/new/choose
You can also use #help on Discord: https://discord.gg/vlang
real 6m50.090s
user 6m8.375s
sys 0m31.094s
> What's your hardware? CPU/SSD.
i7-7700 3.60 GHz, 48 GB of RAM, SSD in use, Windows 10 WSL (that's probably why kernel time is higher than average, otherwise my userland time agrees with the OP).
It says
Note: `tcc` was not used, so unless you install it yourself, your backend C compiler will be `cc`, which is usually either `clang`, `gcc` or `msvc`.
Also you have "gcc" in your error:
See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-7/README.Bugs>
And on the website the claim is made for tcc and x64 backends.
Like I said, no way it'd take 15 seconds :)
https://github.com/vlang/v/pull/14805
Over promising (hardly a one line patch) and under delivering (well beyond your "it will be fixed today" statement) as usual.
The patch adds two consecutives if statements to forbid the behaviour and could surely be written as a 2 lines or one line patch.
Not checked the timeline. It it is a bit irrelevant, I am not here to score point for either author.
I have a test project of around 5k lines of V, taken from a prototype in Go. Using V has been much more pleasant than Go or Zig, but I like zig comptime features. V is a nice language syntactically. Go has better tooling and is mature. I also rewrote the same code in Zig which I would trust today for production. Finally, I really like zig (and Jai) build system, and Jai very logical design and meta-programming features (no, I am not in the beta).
Hopefully from that statement, everyone can see that I am rooting for the adversarial team and therefore you can all discard my commment as biased
While I would agree with many of the comments regarding how the V site is not clear enough on the level of maturity for each of the attempted goal, and very quick to celebrate work in progress, I feel that balanced comments on this thread are mixed with some which would probably trigger me should I have invested lots of energy in trying to make V successful. Thanksfully I only contributed one AST optimisation as curious bystander, so I can read this thread as most will do: noting how people are capable of listening without hearing.
All this discussion did was to radicalise even more both parties. I would hope V developers will take the time to review what was posted in this thread, when the minds have cooled down, and will try to understand the cultural differences which can exist between people when it comes to reviewing public claims made.
I attempted once to bring this exact topic in the discord channel but reading the room there was zero appetite for change, so I stopped as I felt I would be alienating people if I continued. I self censored to not damage my standing on discord ~ so why am I ruining it with this post: to say that asking people to meet you on your ground to discuss problems is not going to work (general statement) People with nuanced opinion will often shut up when the discussion hits up. When points are not understood, the tension rises and the quality of argumentation reduces very quickly.
My view, and feel free to disagree, is that the V community has been burned out and does not welcome criticism anymore, trust in other developers is broken, from here no constructive discussion can happen anymore and for some participants of this thread the same can be said the other way round.
Team Problem? If it is not communication, it is communication https://www.mtdtraining.com/blog/lencionis-five-dysfunctions...
Funny, I notice the supporters of other languages don't seem to follow such advice. They make strong defenses and advocate for the languages they like, anywhere and everywhere, including on even this thread.
If anything, V supporters might want to be more vocal and show their support (which can be done in various ways), to counter what's going on. It doesn't work to stay quiet and let bullies keep slapping a person around. They incorrectly interpret it as a sign to continue.
But as long as you’re here on HN could you please at least follow this community’s guidelines? Several of your posts have been flagged for containing personal attacks, and accusations of bad faith and gaslighting are not well-received here. If you’re going to continue commenting, please just make your comments substantive. A strong defense of V would not include accusing others of bad faith because they didn’t file a bug report of GitHub.
Those people who are open-minded about programming languages, can make up their own minds about V. I'm quite sure their decisions will not be solely dependent on HN or me, if they even come by here.
And sure, I will heed the warning to watch my back on HN, to include the downvoting and flagging.
The "projection", is coming from yourself. That you are a supporter of Zig and Rust, is your own business, that's not the focus of this thread or what my comments are about. But clearly you couldn't help yourself to come do some bashing of a rival language, then gaslight about why there might be a reaction to it.
Unfortunately it’s very hard to convince self-proclaimed victims that they are not in fact victims, because then you become one of the “detractors” or “competitors” looking to “gaslight” and “slander”.
I’ve never seen a language with so much self-inflicted drama around it.
And there is more:
1) The OP does not mention he is evaluating an alpha version of the language.
2) OP starts the "evaluation" with a link to a very contentious and controversial post from 2019, which smears the author and describes the language as vaporware (despite it being 2022 now and over 100 releases later).
3) At no time during the creation of his supposedly month long "evaluation" did the OP reach out to the V developers or community to verify anything in his report.
4) At no time did the OP demonstrate any good will by filing any bug reports or creating a discussion at V's GitHub. He had a unknown throwaway GitHub account, to easily do such.
5) The OP's "evaluation" summary (that can not be responded to) is full of opinions that are subject to interpretation.
6) Exactly how qualified is this mystery evaluator doing this negative review? Unknown.
7) Multiple times in the review, the OP mentions "we", as if he is part of a team. Who is "we"? Unknown.
8) The OP avoids attempts to be engaged in debate with V developers on various points about his review or make it known that he will modify it for correctness, fairness, or language version.
If I'm buying a sandwich advertised as "no cockroaches", then I think it's appropriate to be pissed off about there being bugs in my sandwich, especially when it's clear that the sandwich shop knows all about the bugs in the sandwich and they just prefer to falsely claim their absence.
I would have no complaints if the developers would just describe these things as ambitious goals they haven't actually accomplished yet, instead of declaring that they've completed work they know they have not completed.
Features are explicitly listed as working, partially done, and not yet implemented. You're really truly allowed to say "This doesn't work yet, but we're working on...", and it is legitimate to criticize people for choosing to lie instead.
Actual quote from this comment:
Personally I think it is something that should be ignored until it dies into obscurity
There are good ideas there, but if you sell someone the moon and give them a block of cheese that's kind of a scam
This is very different from saying most of the statements on the website are false, which would be a completely absurd accusation, as you correctly point out.
The summary section is literally a list of specific claims and the author's evaluation of these specific claims: https://mawfig.github.io/2022/06/18/v-lang-in-2022.html#summ...
My comment was refuting that these posts are not "frothing at the chance to disparage this language and it's author". I stand by my refutation that these posts are appropriate, specific, relevant criticism, and that they cite specific evidence for their specific disagreements with the stated claims.
You are certainly welcome to disagree with this author's claims! That sounds like appropriate, specific, relevant criticism of this author's claim. Would you say that you are "frothing at the chance to disparage this author"? I don't.
I'll admit to some satire in my top comment on this subthread. By saying "It's because of all the lying", I was partly satirically reacting to what I saw as inappropriate hyperbole in "frothing at the mouth to disparage". I broadly agree that the V website is fine, just a little distasteful by my aesthetic.
If you think it's fine for V documentation and advocacy to overstate their case and not mention significant gaps in what they claim the language has, I can't see how you'd call it inappropriate for other people who care about the production-suitability of a language to explicitly document what they believe to be major gaps in the production-readiness of a language claiming to have important safety features people want to rely on.
For some context on my interpretation of these posts, I think about how many times over my career I've had to deal with software that claims to have "just a few bugs" on something important, but somehow the bugs never actually get fixed, and the fully general solution just never appears. These things really are genuinely difficult to design and build a fully general solution for. It takes time and engineering work, as we can see by these people finding a lot of holes as soon as they looked.
As an engineer, I've had a lot of frustration from dealing with bugs and outages and maintenance issues that can be significantly improved by a good language. That's why I care so much about really wanting these things that V claims to have, and also why I care so much about the details of how exactly the claims currently fall short. It's so easy to overpromise, so I'm skeptical of any marketing for a new still-in-development tool that just claims to have solutions, with no big disclaimers about how they're still incomplete.
Regarding your specific example, the problem that's being implied by the "setting array length on creation is a terrible idea" is that every time you're setting an array length in V, any mistake will not be caught by the compiler, and can be an exploitable memory safety violation. Memory safety vulnerabilities really truly have been and continue to be a serious ongoing source of serious computer security problems. V making various memory safety claims like no null and no reading from uninitialized memory, and then that being trivially broken on literally the most obvious possible violation, without even any safety marker to make sure it's obvious that this is a place where you can violate memory safety, means that it's just not a language I want to use.
I agree that these posts are very passionate. I assert that these posts come from a passionate interest in what V aspires to be, and they hold V to a high standard, and find it believable that V can actually hit that high standard, and so they've checked it, and here are the places where you'll need to be extremely careful if you want to really rely on this in a high-reliability setting. It is not frothing at the mouth, and it is not disparagement; it is accurate and precise and specific and appropriate feedback, along with some emotional expression that I find relatable and appropriate.
What mistake? Does this apply to literally every other language, like Go with its `make([]int, len)`.
> If you think it's fine for V documentation and advocacy to overstate their case and not mention significant gaps in what they claim the language has
Can you link to such examples in V documentation?
Honestly, from the outside reading this thread you probably shouldn’t have come here in the first place. I get you want to defend your language, but there’s a fine line between defending your creation and being argumentative with people who don’t actually mean you harm, and who aren’t trying to take you down.
Your posts here are very defensive, and your tone is argumentative to the point when someone gave you accurate info about using tcc, you refused to believe it and argued about it for several posts. Just listen instead of arguing.
Look, I get you want to defend your creation. But my advice from one lang dev to another is stop posting on hn, and do what you’re good at by working on making your claims about your language bulletproof instead. People have been giving you this advice since you started V years ago but you haven’t taken it. Let V speak for itself. Stop arguing with people on the internet.
fn main() {
x := []&int { len: 10, cap: 0 }
println(x[4])
}
This does not apply to every other language. The specific problem is that V lets you directly adjust the array length without doing anything to ensure that the array capacity is at least as large as the newly-specified length. Go's `make([]int, len)` ensures that the produced array's capacity is at least len. Go does have some memory safety issues (data races), but this specific issue is not a problem that Go has.
> Can you link to such examples in V documentation?
I agree with the article we're discussing that the "Safety" section prominently displayed on https://vlang.io/ immediately after the header is significantly overstating its case. Here is the list, each item of which is discussed specifically in this blog post, with minimal source code you can run to check their work:
- No null
- No undefined values
- No undefined behavior
- No variable shadowing
- Bounds checking
- Immutable variables by default
- Immutable structs by default
- Pure functions by default -- This has since been removed from the list, but was present when the author started this review: https://web.archive.org/web/20220305171852/https://vlang.io/
- Option/Result and mandatory error checks
- Sum types
- Generics
- Immutable function args by default, mutable args have to be marked on call
- No global variables
"No Undefined Values" is misleading because the compiler does not actually prevent reading uninitialized memory.
"No Undefined Behaviour" is misleading because the C code generated by the V compiler does include behaviour that is undefined according to the C language standard.
"No Variable Shadowing" is correct; the V compiler rejects programs that would shadow variables. I don't actually see this as a benefit, as I use shadowing all the time, but it's an accurate statement about the current V compiler.
"Bounds Checking" is mostly correct, but slightly misleading because the bounds are exposed to your code, and it's up to you to make sure you manipulate them correctly.
"Immutable variables by default" and the other immutability points are misleading because functions that accept immutable arguments can still mutate those arguments.
Compared to languages with real mutability tracking, this is far less helpful in designing misuse-resistant APIs, and avoiding hard-to-diagnose bugs caused by unexpected mutation.
"Pure functions by default" is misleading because the V developer has chosen to use their own special nonstandard meaning for "Pure" that includes IO, and because of the mutability tracking not actually being effective.
"Option/Result and mandatory error checks" is correct and fine; I have no problems with this.
"Sum Types" is kind of okay, but they look kinda janky and limited. This article's example of sum types not being able to hold references is pretty concerning.
"Generics" is kind of okay, but it similarly is a very early very limited implementation.
"No global variables" is just false. V has "constants", which are just "immutable" global variables, and as we've already seen, V's "immutability" is very mutable.
This blog post also addresses the "Performance", "Fast Compilation", and "Innovative memory management" sections of https://vlang.io/.
Broadly speaking, https://vlang.io/ seems to very clearly present the language as one that is suitable for use today. I don't see anything on the main page of https://vlang.io/ that says anything even vaguely similar to "This is a very early language, these features are aspirational but still very much under serious development, and there are many known gaps we have not built solutions to yet".
By my personal standards of epistemic integrity, the front page of https://vlang.io/ is misleading and dishonest. I recognize that many people consider this kind of "marketing" to be acceptable, and I'm fine with letting people do that as long as they're not complaining about people actually checking their claims.
I really love the ambition of V, and I would be very happy to use it if it were actually production-ready. I have sometimes used early-development tools in production when I've had a good understanding of what the actual gaps and deficiencies and defects in the under-development software are. V's aggressive marketing that goes out of its way to avoid discussing its weaknesses means that I can't actually rely on what I read from them about the language's suitability for high-reliability use. When someone shows me that they're happy and willing and eager to mislead people about the flaws in something, then I believe them!
To me, these posts seem to be written from a perspective of eagerly wanting to use the language that seems to be advertised, and being disappointed at the big gap between the marketing and reality. The two big messages I see in these blog posts are "Here are problems I found that make me concerned about using V" and also, separately, "V appears to be marketed as if it were a polished product suitable for production use, and that's concerning, given the problems found."
Notice the end of this post: "At this time, I would not recommend spending time on V. I would also be very cautious when taking claims made by the authors at face value."
This author explicitly says "At this time" they don't think V is suitable to rely on or will be soon, and they encourage skepticism when interpreting claims made by the author. This does not read at all like someone hateful to me. This very much reads like someone who really wants a production-quality V language to use, and hopes that the project someday succeeds.
> null pointer segfaults They are not segfaults and are not related to memory safety. Segfault stands for "segmentation fault", not "runtime exception". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmentation_fault
"Fearless concurrency" is more subjective, but rust code (again with the caveat that there isn't unsafe code, or unsafe cose upholds all unvariants) dows eliminate certain classes of concurrency bugs. Although, dreadlocks are definitely possible, and certain kinds of race conditions could potentially exist. But I don't know of any claims that concurrency bugs are impossible in rust.
and looking at their compiler it's clear why. stack-allocation of vars is fine and dandy, but comparable to vlang's famous unbounded autofree system. alloca() is dangerous for a reason.
unsafe vec, really?? mutexes in threads, really?? concurrent blocking IO in this decade??
also read their docs about their unsafeties, and concurrency deficiencies. compare that to the docs of real safe languages. you won't find such chapters, because safe languages are safe, not just almost-safe.
First of all, most of those erorors are about stack overflows in the compiler not the compiled program. And secondly, stack overflow isn't a memory safety issue like, say use-after-free, uninitialized variables, data races, etc. If you allow recursive function calls, you can't really prevent stack overflows.
> alloca() is dangerous for a reason
Rust doesn't have an equivalent of alloca.
> unsafe vec, really??
I'm not sure what you are referring to here.
> mutexes in threads, really??
What does this have to do with memory safety? The only language with threads I know of that doesn't have mutexes is Erlang. And rust Mutexes are better than mutexes in most other languages because you can't access the data protected by the mutex at all, unless you have a lock. And the lock is automatically freed when it goes out of scope.
> concurrent blocking IO in this decade??
Again, what does this have to do with memory safety? And for many applications blocking IO is fine. You don't always need the performance of async I/O which adds complexity. And if you do need async i/o, rust has options there too (just not in the standard library).
> also read their docs about their unsafeties, and concurrency deficiencies.
The Rust Programming Language book has one section of one chapter on "unsafety", and that is specifically on using the `unsafe` escape hatch. Yes, there is a separate book about how to write a `unsafe` code that maintains rust's safety garantees. but that is limited to `unsafe` blocks, which in many cases you can just avoid using. As compared to c or c++, where the entire language is full of potential safety problems.
> compare that to the docs of real safe languages. you won't find such chapters, because safe languages are safe, not just almost-safe.
What "real safe languages" would those be? Can they be used in all the same domains as rust?
https://github.com/vlang/v/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sta...
I've never had one in 3 years.
edit: ah, you meant Rust
I doubt the rust team will try to "fix" that.
Keep in mind /dev/mem is just a convention, I can just mknod it at any place in the filesystem I want. I can even put a FUSE overlay on it that would turn it into a regular file instead of a device node, so you wouldn't have any possible way of telling what you're about to do.
There is no "defense" against /dev/mem, that's just something you don't do as a sane programmer.
> V avoids doing unnecessary allocations in the first place by using value types, string buffers, promoting a simple abstraction-free code style.
> Right now allocations are handled by a minimal and well performing GC until V's autofree engine is production ready.
The situation is also not as simplistic as making claims bulletproof, but also dealing with a continuous concerted effort to smear the language.
I think it's pretty clear.
Anyway, now that we are clear on the compilation speed claim, can you please list a couple of those extraordinary claims?
The irony of you picking apart the OP's wording as not being exactly correct is just too much. There's the projection I was talking about. :-)
> Multiple times in the review, the OP mentions "we", as if he is part of a team. Who is "we"? Unknown.
On the off chance that you just aren't aware of the idiom, it's common to say "we" as in "me and you, the reader."
Search for "we" in one of my pieces of writing, for example: https://blog.burntsushi.net/csv/
There's nothing nefarious about it. See also: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5500/use-of-fir...
And nonsense like setting array length on creation is a terrible idea. Go with its `make([]int, 5)` must be a terrible scam language as well.
If he had a good faith, he'd report these issues via GitHub, and they'd get fixed within a week.
So, regarding your claim that I have "a habit of overpromising and even declaring things finished before even starting on them".
Please, list them here. 1.2.3.
Must be easy if there's a habit.
Alex, all of these are still open right not and are not fixed:
- "No mut m := x mutability check" https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/14803
- "closure capture names are not checked for uniqueness with the closure parameter names" https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/14787
- "segfault in auto string method generated for []&int{len:1} (does not check for 0 pointers)" https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/14786
> using -prod for measuring compiler speed
My article does not do that. I included all the steps used and the 1,000,000 line tests use tcc and not -prod.
> And nonsense like setting array length on creation is a terrible idea. Go with its `make([]int, 5)` must be a terrible scam language as well.
V allows the user to override length field which is used in bounds-checking with no validation. That's the problem.
Please stop lying and just be honest about the state of V.
Given the behavior of you, Tozen and ylluminate on this thread, I have zero interest in interacting with the V "community" again.
No it doesn't, it can only be set on init.
Please stop lying and just be honest about the state of V.
You never interacted with the community, never reported the bugs, never discussed these issues on Discord. Gotta create a new account and spread disinfo.
What a nice character you are.
The V project should feel free to pull any bug reports they want out of my blog post (I see they've already done so multiple times). From the votes on the comment section here, I can it's obvious to everyone how dysfunctional the V community is which explains a lot about the state of the project. I will not be interacting with you again.
And you have the audacity to call the V community dysfunctional.
This is false.
1) It is the author of the blog, that also created this thread on HN.
It shows the intent to disseminate his negative review as far and as wide as possible. And to do so outside of the V community.
2) If the OP was as eager to use the language as you believe, and was disappointed, he could have brought those issues to the V GitHub.
Who is going to the fix those issues that the OP (or anyone else) believes is a problem? It is going to be the V developers. So if the OP wanted those things that he believes are a problem fixed, that's who he has to bring them to.
Just outright mounting a smear campaign or crapping on the V language wherever possible, will never get any of the issues fixed on its own. Instead, as has been shown (by other places linking to the OP's blog), it will only invite more smearing and attacks.
3) The OP starts the review by linking to a number of very contentious posts from competitors and detractors of V, to include those that smear the author and language.
To do such will clearly set off drama, and makes the negative review part of the past drama. It now links them all together. This is not the intent of a person that wishes to "come in peace" or be helpful, this comes across as one having the purpose to set off a blazing fire of more drama.
4) The OP has shown no interest in working with V developers, and that's prior to publishing the review and spreading links to it.
The OP has demonstrated no intent to modify his review for correctness, fairness, or language version. This then puts "at this time", in the context that the review can stay as it is, indefinitely, regardless.
Add to that, the OP is purposely using a throwaway account on GitHub. He simply can disappear, without ever making changes to the review. We all know who the creator of V is and a number of its developers, they are all held accountable, as you are trying to do now. The OP on the other hand, has no accountability nor any "skin in the game".
5) The OP's review is without the necessary context and highly opinionated.
Without feedback or the opinions of the V developers, this is a one-sided negative review full of many debatable points about the claims made. The many gray areas can only gain context, when compared with what the V developers are showing their intentions are and in their responses to what are believed to be issues.
For more clarity at what I'm getting at, I'm not saying there are no issues with various claims or marketing, but rather what is claimed can be a matter of opinion. Because a person or reviewer disagrees with a claim, does not make them or their review 100% right either. Readers are left with a situation as to what percentage of either side is correct.
And no matter at what percentage either side is correct, who is going to fix any discovered issues? Right, it will be the V developers. So if the point was not to do any harm and help create production-quality V, then that's who needed/needs to be informed and worked with. If the OP is not interested in working with V developers, and rather produce and disseminate drama or facilitate smearing, then that's a reflection of their real intent.
Go write your own blog post. Submit it to hn. Refute all the points in the blog with evidence and code. Then we can have a follow up discussion with more substance.
At this point, you’ve made your position clear and you’re talking in circles. The way you combat a negative story is with a positive story. Whining about how unfair everyone is being to your favorite new language is a perfect way to limit its growth.
As such a small community, your personal behavior on public forums defines the tone of the entire V community for outsiders. You should critically analyze your posts here and ask yourself if they leave the impression of a community people would want to join.
It also appears you prefer to see negative opinions or commentary about V, and are getting overly upset or obsessed with those you believe are defending the language in any way. I'm simply responding to a thread on HN (as you are), that was not made by me, and calling out things that I see or believe to be unfair.
The V community has open discussions that anybody can join and make comments on. You can also freely create an appropriate discussion at the V GitHub. This is something that it appears you don't know about (and what the OP purposely avoided), as you're "talking in circles" with me and giving your opinions about "whining". The link to it is below.
What don't you like about V / what would you like to be changed? (https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610)
You can also interact with the V community on discord as well. (https://discord.com/invite/vlang)
You are free to go there and submit your many opinions about what the members of the V community should or should not be doing. Even better, as you seem to describe yourself as very technical and knowledgeable. You would be commenting directly to them. In general, they are very receptive, open, and friendly.
(This is my final response on this matter. I have already given enough information and an inability to interpret it is not my business.)
I've just tested it, and turns out all C compilers are terrible at hundreds of thousands of print calls (for me Clang was stuck for minutes with 100% cpu usage).
The claim was made about actual code, like the V compiler itself, which is about 220k loc and compiles in 0.3 seconds, not some unrealistic test with a million of prints.
I'll make it clear on the home page with a link to the benchmark.
Like I said, it's already pretty clear what kind of character you are.
Unfortunately for you, the V community is small and you tend to come here on HN, so you are who we see as an ambassador for V. You are a defacto representative of the community even if you do t see yourself as such. The way you comport yourself here reflects on the entire community. Fair? No. But if you read the comments here and in other threads, you’re definitely leaving an impression as to the entire V community.
> You are free to go there and submit your many opinions about what the members of the V community should or should not be doing.
I don’t have many opinions, I have one opinion and I have given it to you. Stop arguing on the internet and just make your claims bulletproof.
There is no "we", everybody on here does not think as you do. Better to clearly speak for yourself.
> ...defacto representative of the community...
If you bothered to read and pay attention, the creator of V posted on this thread. This includes other V contributors (that debated some technical points), and long time proud paying supporters of V (who have identified themselves as such).
I have also clearly (and now repeatedly) told you that I'm not the V community nor do my personal opinions represent them. I'm expressing my opinions on HN, as you are, which refer to the actions of the OP and the topic of this thread. Anybody with common sense should understand that. Stop being so upset that there are people with different opinions about V and are supportive, not everybody gets off on smearing others or clings to negativity.
> ...make your claims bulletproof
It is not my position nor place to make any claims bulletproof, in reference to V, to your personal satisfaction. If anybody wants to actually address the V community, and tell them their opinions about what they could be doing or share their technical knowledgeable on the subject, then instead of just trying to argue me down specifically, they can go over to where they are at (V Github or discord).