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V is an Ethical Disaster

Bonus!

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vlang.io

  • Systems language heavily inspired by Go: "If you know Go, you already know ≈80% of V." (website)
  • Created by Alexander Medvednikov, announced Jan/Feb 2019
  • Initially closed source, but "pre-alpha" made available Jun 2019
  • Compiles to C; amd64 backend planned for V 1.0
  • Alex currently (30 Nov 2021) earns $804/mo on Patreon; accepts but does not disclose GH sponsors

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Impossible Claims

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"V doesn't use garbage collection or reference counting. The compiler cleans everything up during compilation. If your V program compiles, it's guaranteed that it's going to be leak free."

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Reality: memory management

  • "Alex the author at one stage claimed, indirectly, to be planning to solve the halting problem by having no GC, no ref counting and no lifetime annotations, … only for V to now feature ref counting because obviously one cant [sic] solve the halting problem…" (u/Strum355)
  • "Even ref counting was a promise they failed to deliver, now they suggest to use boehm garbage collector." (u/pbspbsingh)
  • Plan for V 0.3: "make -autofree the default" (ROADMAP.md)
    • Currently, autofree blindly inserts a call to C free() for each heap variable at the end of the scope.
  • N.B.: As of Jun 2020, V compiler leaked ~7MB to compile Hello World (Xe)

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"Compiles itself in <1s with zero dependencies."

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A dependency is what?

  • But V compiles to C! (website, GH, every other source in existence)

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(Xe)

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????era

  • Alex claimed for a year that using an AST in the compiler makes output programs slower??
  • As of ca. Jun 2020, V compiler uses an AST in order to implement the various promised features that ostensibly require an AST
  • (GH #35)

​

  • "No, this is x64 machine code generation. In 0.5s you'll get a binary. At this stage it's not going to work with such a complex application like Doom 3 …" (Alex, GH #35)

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DOOM.v

"DOOM translated from C to V. Builds in 0.7 seconds (x25 speed-up)."

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So how's that look?

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Response to

Questions & Criticism

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just ban 'em lolmao

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Sources

  • website: https://vlang.io
  • GH: https://github.com/vlang/v
    • GH #35 ("This language is not as advertised"): https://github.com/vlang/v/issues/35
  • Xe: https://christine.website/blog/vlang-update-2020-06-17
  • Various Reddit comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/ozd3ma/vlang_has_been_opensourced_and_is_trending_on/

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