
Almost a year later, how is V doing? - bowero
https://bowero.nl/blog/2020/01/05/almost-a-year-later-how-is-v-doing/
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ATsch
I think it should have been pretty obvious to most people that V was never a
serious language project. Because of successful marketing, an amateurs toy
language project somehow became a viral success, which it has been
unsuccessfully trying to justify ever since.

Although with a surprising ~1k/mo of funding, I'm really curious if there
might actually be a chance V will eventually be a somewhat useful project
long-term, if the funding keeps up.

~~~
oddity
It's almost tautological, but outside of academia, languages tend to become
relevant and useful because software gets written in them. If the funding
stays, then it's only a matter of time before one of the non-zero people
interested in V writes something useful in it. The problem then reduces to
whether that happens before the funding/development stops.

C alternatives/rehashes are probably on the same order of magnitude as C
programmers. Years ago, I would eagerly hop from one to the other until they
eventually died, so I can understand the appetite. Nowadays, I'm more aware of
the costs of not using something that is well-established. I'm glad people
keep making them and will never discourage learning, exploration, and
experimentation, but I think they're generally a waste of time for everyone
who isn't the author/maintainer.

On the other hand, there's a certain language where I felt (and still feel) it
had no good technical reason to exist or be used at launch. At launch, I
didn't take it seriously and was irritated when people started using it.
However, it had the backing of a multibillion dollar company, a somewhat
stable implementation with tooling, and users who were clearly enthusiastic
regardless of what I thought. Now, there's actual libraries written in it and
I can't find the effort to be angry. The existence of an ecosystem made the
language useful.

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apta
I highly recommend taking a look at Zig[0]. It's coming along quite nicely,
and has a quite unique take on systems programming.

[0] [https://ziglang.org/](https://ziglang.org/)

