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Comment by amedvednikov | Hacker News Reader

> this language has literally no unique attributes that would make it different than D or Go

It does, a lot: https://vlang.io/compare#go

Let me preface it: go is a thoroughly uninteresting and in my opinion bad language from a PL perspective - it demonstrably failed at many things we have known for 40 years before it.

Adding some of that back to V only “fixes” where Go went wrong, so I would need something additional on top to consider this language.

Go is a great language, revolutionary, I would say.

Just for one thing: focus on simplicity and fast builds.

If your language is too simplistic, essential complexity will just live in your ad hoc program instead, which is objectively worse. Especially that you will realize it later that you are missing some core utils and have to patch it up (e.g. generics in case of go).

There are dynamic languages with zero compile times, but Java builds just as fast for me as Go and it is a much more expressive language than Go, which is a shame.

> If your language is too simplistic, essential complexity will just live in your ad hoc program instead, which is objectively worse.

Not from my experience. Go is a breath of fresh air in this over-engineered complex industry.

Go promotes simplicity and speed, and so does V.

Agree to disagree here :)

Not every program is a basic CLI app with 3 network requests, and the only tool we have against complexity is abstractions.

Most of the stuff we use is written in C. Which is even smaller than Go.

You don't need complex langs to write software.

Uh, C is not really small nowadays. ISO C specification is about 200 pages long even without all the library. (It's hard to compare directly, but Go is probably around 50~100 pages long when formatted similarly.) C could have been small enough, but ISO C is not.

Most of the stuff we use was written in C89 and even older versions :)

Also, most of what? Besides OSs, tiny tools, DBs and embedded, C is not used all that much. Where truly high performance is required, the de facto language of choice is C++ (see e.g. browsers) and business applications (which are the most numerous) are definitely not written in C in most cases.

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