The first release was just Go's parser ripped out and bolted onto a barebones first year of college level compiler, and touted as "safer than Rust", "compiles in milliseconds", etc. but didn't even have real type-checking at the time, nor did it free memory, and many other basic functionality. Furthermore, I vividly remember the author's Patreon advertised at the top of the page back then, and for a while he raked in a couple thousand dollars a month for it.
However, over the years some actually talented people (and nowadays probably LLMs) have somehow sort of fixed most of the biggest warts, but it's still nowhere near what it advertised in that first release.
What's wild is I was looking at the language's home page again, and looking to find their GitHub, the first GitHub link I noticed, is the GitHub sponsors link.
I don't mind supporting a project like this, but this is a bit excessive.
Was it really Go's parser? That wouldn't surprise me, but also that kind of makes sense to me why it looked a bit 'familiar' in terms of syntax.
It's definitely been "alpha" tier for a while, which it doesnt help that the developer doesn't outline any sort of stability that I can recall (back then at least) which imho if you're publishing a language, you should let the reader know.
It appears you're calling something a scam because an early alpha version was early alpha quality. If so, that would be unprofessional and inflammatory.
I'm open to being wrong. So again, can you explain what you mean?
They haven't had a stable 1.0 release yet, but they've had many pre-1.0 releases. It's not some personal experiment that's been sitting in the dev's Github that people are piling onto; the author has gone out of their way to promote it, beg for donations, and lash out at any criticisms.
The issue has never been the quality of the language per se, the issue has been 1) wildly misrepresenting the quality of the language in the present tense; 2) not even having any kind of a realistic roadmap towards achieving the kind of outsized and implausible claims about the quality of the language; and 3) using these outsized, implausible misrepresentations as a way of soliciting hype and funding for the author.
For a long time they did weekly releases, which explains the “hundreds” of releases. It looks like they have made enough progress to move to periodic point releases. (I should probably take another look at it.)
I’m not qualified to judge the language as a whole, at least until I use it for something, but it does have some interesting features. I used to follow their progress, but it’s clear that the pace of development is very slow, like many other niche langs.
Defamation? The author's responses and complete lack of honesty certainly made it look like a scam.
The author listed feature after feature that were unfulfilled. Scam is being fairly kind to the project, I thought the guy was the worst kind of liar. You can check out any of the earlier threads on HN to find out for yourself.
It isn't that it was early, it's that it advertised itself to be what it was not. You defending it isn't doing anybody any favors as this is all public record and you're just standing up for a dev that doesn't deserve it
The scammy part was definitely making all of the claims as if they were already true. A lot of people sincerely believed it. My recollection was that it took months before some of this was fixed to explain that it wasn't available yet, and then more to explain that it hadn't actually been done yet.
There were some really crazy ones, like that it could convert entire codebases from C++ to V and then compile them some multiple of times faster and make them memory safe. How? I'd love to know.
The author to me seems like they are not attempting to scam people, but it's hard to ignore that they were collecting money, from people who thought they had already accomplished these things, because the person collecting it absolutely appeared to be claiming it.
Now doing that once and going "oops, my bad" would be one thing. There would be no controversy. However, over time it has proven to be a bit of a behavior pattern, which is confusing because the author does appear to be producing things that I think are interesting. Just... often buried under some hyperbole.
I have this amazing new thing I'm making, nothing like it, better than everything else. Here's a prototype that does none of that and is _barely_ functional. Care to invest $2000? If so, do I have a bridge to show you...
It was impossible to verify the "earth shattering claims" of the designer/users early on, and they would be very very emotional every time you just question the metrics. At one point there was a chart that was basically "for a given task, every compiler on earth: 1min, us: 0.1sec"
And whenever you poke you found it seemed to be comparing apple and oranges and conversations often ended in v users crying because "this is a new project !"
(yet, the crowd kept growing and they seemed to have produced larger and larger projects with this thing)
I remember the controversy around the original announcement. It seems quaint now, honestly. Simpler times. Slop by those olds standards is practically the Mona Lisa now.
I never paid enough attention to figure out if the drama is justified or not (and don't really care either, please don't try to convince me to care either, don't shoot the messenger).
There’s good kinds of drama (competent dev forcefully rejects bad ideas) and bad kinds of drama (activist/corporate takeovers, subpar dev doubles down on mistakes, etc), but I haven’t been following it, so I have no idea which one this is.
First time I heard about V was because of the Volt desktop chat app: https://volt-app.com/ which seemed attractive at the time. Turns out it was completely closed source and read secrets from local browser's cookie storage without any kind of warning. I've never nope'd out of a program so fast.
There are others in this comment section claiming this language is scam. Seems about right. The entire Vinix page is slop, too.
huh, that "minecraft" screenshot is pretty clearly minetest/luanti. the vinix repo has some code at least attempting to do real Minecraft, but does it actually work?
- The bad press was because the initial public release on GitHub did not implement most of the things seemed like they're implemented, (Rust like memory safety etc.)
- Over time it actually saw contributions from a lot of people and is kind of decent now, be it not as polished as Go, Rust, D etc.
- It is super easy to use, so kind of attracts an audience.
The bad press was because after some people tried to call them out for not shipping features that were claimed in the release, those people were banned from further contribution/commenting on github.
> QEMU uses macOS hardware virtualization for the ARM64 desktop.
Huh, since when does QEMU support hardware virtualization on Apple Silicon? To the best of my knowledge, among all the VM managers available on macOS (VMware, Parallels, VirtualBox, …) only UTM currently supports hardware virtualization and that's through the Apple Virtualization backend, not through QEMU.
Huh. Pretty cool. I haven't looked at vnix in a while, and it's been almost as long since I looked at V. It had a lot of controversy early on. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has tried it recently to find out if they ever ended up delivering on their promises.
I don't use it yet but V has pretty much all properties I want from a programming language. I'll check out Vinix, too. I'm almost certain I'll program a significant project in V some time when it has matured a bit more. The fact that users of languages I find useless hate it is also a big plus.
How this scam language gained traction is beyond me.
The book about the language was published by packt, and I had my eyebrows raised. I want to give a benefit of doubt tough and learn more.
This seems to be the language's main page https://vlang.io/
How can a language be a scam?
The first release was just Go's parser ripped out and bolted onto a barebones first year of college level compiler, and touted as "safer than Rust", "compiles in milliseconds", etc. but didn't even have real type-checking at the time, nor did it free memory, and many other basic functionality. Furthermore, I vividly remember the author's Patreon advertised at the top of the page back then, and for a while he raked in a couple thousand dollars a month for it.
However, over the years some actually talented people (and nowadays probably LLMs) have somehow sort of fixed most of the biggest warts, but it's still nowhere near what it advertised in that first release.
What's wild is I was looking at the language's home page again, and looking to find their GitHub, the first GitHub link I noticed, is the GitHub sponsors link.
I don't mind supporting a project like this, but this is a bit excessive.
Was it really Go's parser? That wouldn't surprise me, but also that kind of makes sense to me why it looked a bit 'familiar' in terms of syntax.
It's definitely been "alpha" tier for a while, which it doesnt help that the developer doesn't outline any sort of stability that I can recall (back then at least) which imho if you're publishing a language, you should let the reader know.
Can't have use-after-free errors if you never free.
Can you explain what you mean by this? They haven't had a first release yet. They're still in beta.
That's being pedantic. The first public announcement was many years ago.
It appears you're calling something a scam because an early alpha version was early alpha quality. If so, that would be unprofessional and inflammatory.
I'm open to being wrong. So again, can you explain what you mean?
If I go to the vlang releases page, I see literally hundreds of releases https://github.com/vlang/v/releases
They haven't had a stable 1.0 release yet, but they've had many pre-1.0 releases. It's not some personal experiment that's been sitting in the dev's Github that people are piling onto; the author has gone out of their way to promote it, beg for donations, and lash out at any criticisms.
The issue has never been the quality of the language per se, the issue has been 1) wildly misrepresenting the quality of the language in the present tense; 2) not even having any kind of a realistic roadmap towards achieving the kind of outsized and implausible claims about the quality of the language; and 3) using these outsized, implausible misrepresentations as a way of soliciting hype and funding for the author.
For a long time they did weekly releases, which explains the “hundreds” of releases. It looks like they have made enough progress to move to periodic point releases. (I should probably take another look at it.)
I’m not qualified to judge the language as a whole, at least until I use it for something, but it does have some interesting features. I used to follow their progress, but it’s clear that the pace of development is very slow, like many other niche langs.
Those comments may be fair. Defamation is not.
Defamation? The author's responses and complete lack of honesty certainly made it look like a scam.
The author listed feature after feature that were unfulfilled. Scam is being fairly kind to the project, I thought the guy was the worst kind of liar. You can check out any of the earlier threads on HN to find out for yourself.
It isn't that it was early, it's that it advertised itself to be what it was not. You defending it isn't doing anybody any favors as this is all public record and you're just standing up for a dev that doesn't deserve it
The scammy part was definitely making all of the claims as if they were already true. A lot of people sincerely believed it. My recollection was that it took months before some of this was fixed to explain that it wasn't available yet, and then more to explain that it hadn't actually been done yet.
There were some really crazy ones, like that it could convert entire codebases from C++ to V and then compile them some multiple of times faster and make them memory safe. How? I'd love to know.
The author to me seems like they are not attempting to scam people, but it's hard to ignore that they were collecting money, from people who thought they had already accomplished these things, because the person collecting it absolutely appeared to be claiming it.
Now doing that once and going "oops, my bad" would be one thing. There would be no controversy. However, over time it has proven to be a bit of a behavior pattern, which is confusing because the author does appear to be producing things that I think are interesting. Just... often buried under some hyperbole.
For a longer read:
https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v
Yes. Agreed. Did you intend to respond to someone else?
I have this amazing new thing I'm making, nothing like it, better than everything else. Here's a prototype that does none of that and is _barely_ functional. Care to invest $2000? If so, do I have a bridge to show you...
Lol this is interesting. If you want to make money you can "invent" a language. With LLMs you could probably make it pretty decent too.
I have no opinion on the subject but I have found this to be an interesting dive into the supposed controversy: https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v
It was impossible to verify the "earth shattering claims" of the designer/users early on, and they would be very very emotional every time you just question the metrics. At one point there was a chart that was basically "for a given task, every compiler on earth: 1min, us: 0.1sec"
And whenever you poke you found it seemed to be comparing apple and oranges and conversations often ended in v users crying because "this is a new project !"
(yet, the crowd kept growing and they seemed to have produced larger and larger projects with this thing)
I remember the controversy around the original announcement. It seems quaint now, honestly. Simpler times. Slop by those olds standards is practically the Mona Lisa now.
Well tbh I don't care about all the PR surrounding the language. Has anyone used it in it's current state? Is it good? Please be objective.
I don't know.
But I just released a language called U, and I was surprised to see this one.
https://ulanguage.org
When compiling to C, does it use MISRA C or some other accepted standard for how to write secure and reliable C?
Just like V but without sharp edges?
For reference, for the ones who aren't aware of the constant drama that seems to follow V: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (open up almost any discussion and see the flood of similar messages).
I never paid enough attention to figure out if the drama is justified or not (and don't really care either, please don't try to convince me to care either, don't shoot the messenger).
There’s good kinds of drama (competent dev forcefully rejects bad ideas) and bad kinds of drama (activist/corporate takeovers, subpar dev doubles down on mistakes, etc), but I haven’t been following it, so I have no idea which one this is.
I've only dipped my toe in, but it compiles fast code and works. Can't argue with results.
Yeah it seems to be following the No Man's Sky playbook.
I enjoy the screenshot showing Calculator taking 617 MB of RAM. It feels very modern indeed.
You have an amazing eye for details. Might be the "wine calculator" from the desktop.
First time I heard about V was because of the Volt desktop chat app: https://volt-app.com/ which seemed attractive at the time. Turns out it was completely closed source and read secrets from local browser's cookie storage without any kind of warning. I've never nope'd out of a program so fast.
There are others in this comment section claiming this language is scam. Seems about right. The entire Vinix page is slop, too.
It had like two releases after ~2-3 years of hype, too. Maybe long, back when it was called eul.
huh, that "minecraft" screenshot is pretty clearly minetest/luanti. the vinix repo has some code at least attempting to do real Minecraft, but does it actually work?
Its and odd name choice and very close to venix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venix
it seems like a natural name choice to me - "v + unix"
How are things going with V btw? In the past i've seen some bad press about this programming language.
It was nice to use when I tried to dabble with it.
My understanding:
- The bad press was because the initial public release on GitHub did not implement most of the things seemed like they're implemented, (Rust like memory safety etc.)
- Over time it actually saw contributions from a lot of people and is kind of decent now, be it not as polished as Go, Rust, D etc.
- It is super easy to use, so kind of attracts an audience.
The bad press was because after some people tried to call them out for not shipping features that were claimed in the release, those people were banned from further contribution/commenting on github.
> QEMU uses macOS hardware virtualization for the ARM64 desktop.
Huh, since when does QEMU support hardware virtualization on Apple Silicon? To the best of my knowledge, among all the VM managers available on macOS (VMware, Parallels, VirtualBox, …) only UTM currently supports hardware virtualization and that's through the Apple Virtualization backend, not through QEMU.
HVF was added quite some time ago afaik.
Huh. Pretty cool. I haven't looked at vnix in a while, and it's been almost as long since I looked at V. It had a lot of controversy early on. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has tried it recently to find out if they ever ended up delivering on their promises.
It looks nice. How much vibecoding does it contain? Can we trust these claims?
V is a super young language, I wonder if llms even can produce decent code with it.
YAAAAY! ANOTHER (long-term useless) "HOBBY" OS!
I don't use it yet but V has pretty much all properties I want from a programming language. I'll check out Vinix, too. I'm almost certain I'll program a significant project in V some time when it has matured a bit more. The fact that users of languages I find useless hate it is also a big plus.