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13 pointsTozen8 comments

The fact that blogspam showing "hello world" written in a vaporware language hit the front page is deeply depressing.

https://xeiaso.net/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23

The author made a mistake in that blog post. In the section about memory leaks, they say:

> Looking at the generated C code it's plainly obvious to see this memory leak. init_consts creates a 1000 byte allocation and never frees it. This is a memory leak that is unavoidable in any program compiled with V.

But the allocated memory is a static allocation. There isn't really a reason to free it. It's used whenever tos2 is called, which happens in many places according to the code. If you complain that this is a memory leak, then you should complain that any static allocation is a memory leak.

I've used Vlang a fair amount, and made small minor contributions to its compiler, REPL, and documentation. Personally, I wouldn't consider it suitable for game development, as stated in the article. If you try, you will be very disappointed by its math features, especially for SIMD, its unsophisticated integration with graphics and compute APIs, lack of advanced multithreading and synchronization, and the weak metaprogramming features for performance-sensitive containers you get accustomed to in C++.

V also really can't support custom allocators effectively, much less a hierarchy of memory arenas. To do almost anything, you need a global heap allocator, because the compiler inserts invisible malloc() calls.

That said, I love the language's control flow. It's expression oriented and has a flow-sensitive type system with a very terse syntax.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, the last place I remember, this vlang thing turned out to be somewhat over-promised, under-delivered / too good to be true / at least mildly controversial (I remember conversations like [1] references).

Did all of that settle down?

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/ozd3m...

It settled down a bit, but continues to be a source of drama. The language now has a community which is contributing and striving to bring the promises to reality, but there's still an air of fragility when any criticism is leveled at the language.

May I ask why people still consider V vaporware? Yes, the creator was a little bit too energetic in the beginning and listed all the POSSIBLE things he wanted V to be able to do, but held none of these promises in practice, but as we see now since the development progressed significantly it was probably just a childish mistake and not a bad intent.

So could someone as objectively as possible say why V is still bad/vaporware or even what progress it has made and what is still lacking?

I love V more than any other language. I've been using the language for quite some time now. I would like to use it for interviews, but when I say that my favorite programming language is "V", interviewers ask me to use something "more mainstream".

As they should. Code written on the job must be understandable to your coworkers.

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