V and it's creator get a lot of flack here on HN and the criticisms are probably warranted. However, I personally enjoy seeing them out here hustling and really trying to make their language succeed despite all the shortcomings. As someone who skews more apathetic, I enjoy seeing people driven by so much passion.
Now, it's time for me to be one of those critics! It's easy to promote the speed and size of your github alternative when it has a fraction of the features. I'll be curious to see where this goes and I think it has some value but only as a way to dogfood V itself.
> V and it's creator get a lot of flack here on HN and the criticisms are probably warranted.
Hi fellow Penguin :D!
I'm impressed by the creator's dedication here too, but he's clearly biting off more then he can chew - he's been saying that he's making a
* Web framework
* GUI framework
* SQL ORM
* A language that has a lot of promises - seriously checkout their list.
* Github alternative
* VIM alternative
This stuff is awesome as a project, but each one of these have teams of dedicated engineers sponsored by many companies to hammer out issues and make them as robust as possible. And while he certainly has working demo's of each, they're demos. There's a huge difference between a POC and a robust framework.
A half baked framework is useless sadly, I think he's spreading himself too thin while have a roadmap that looks like a programmer's christmas list.
When you have a large number of people in Zone 2 and nobody in Zone 1, this is a very good sign that effort is being fairly distributed. And if you look at the activity for the last year:
it is extremely active with 98% days active. And if I had to guess, I would say there are at least 5-7 people working on this full time based on the following:
While your here, thank you for the awesome work on the V language!
It pretty much has the (for me, subjectively) ideal features of a small, fast, and static programming language. I've been following it for a while and I'm pretty sure I'll find a good use for it soon!
Those that lie often either don't respect other people or they don't have the ability to know when they are lying. Which is scarier?
Go, Nim, and Zig have similar focuses and their devs have put in years of public, good work.
Some of the take downs at the time he was making his initial claims are absolutely brutal and make it clear that he not only couldn't back up his crazy claims, he wasn't getting the small stuff right.
Some points in that page don't seem like valid criticism. Like, complaining that the compiler is not "zero dependency" on Linux, because it depends on glibc?
Also, allocating a fixed 1000 byte region at the start of a program is not a "memory leak". In fact even glibc has tons of such "initial fixed cost" allocations - IIRC valgrind has built-in "suppression file" to ignore these allocations. (It would be a memory leak if the compiler allocated new 1000 byte chunks every time println is called, but the article doesn't demonstrate it so I guess I'll never know.)
> V can be bootstrapped in under a second by compiling its code translated to C with a simple
cc v.c
No libraries or dependencies needed.
Git is a dependency, which means perl is a dependency, which means a shell is a dependency, which means glibc is a dependency, which means that a lot of other things (including posix threads) are also dependencies. Pedantically, you could even go as far as saying that you could count the Linux kernel, the processor being used and the like as dependencies, but that's a bit out of scope for this.
==============
Ridiculous and unnecessary nitpicking.
Also benchmarking the language with a debug build, using a slower backend, and while running vfmt.
Here's a better benchmark: V compiling itself in 0.3 seconds:
So if it was a release build from the time, there wouldn't have been massive memory leaks, she would have been able to compile 1.2 million LoC per core per second, V would have only used 400kb of space to compile itself, and the curl binary wouldn't have been used for the download_file function? I agree that there's a cutoff where Linux dependencies don't really count as dependencies in this case.
This is great. I try to have an objective discussion about whether or not Christine's critique is fair, get no response, and am downvoted by who I assume are V lang fanboys. Not improving my impression of the language.
It's important to sort out these lies (and apologize for them if they were, in fact, lies) because no company will use a product they can't trust to do what it says. Though it's all at V lang's own peril I suppose.
Calling this "a really great"web app is a significant stretch. It's an extremely bare bones clone of GitHub. Another case of over promising and under delivering from the V team.
I would like to believe Gitly is a really great web app. The problem is, how can I trust the claims that have been made about Gitly, when I have reason to distrust the group making the claims?
Christine's blog posts indicate V lang is blatantly over promising and under delivering. You can't claim a language is memory safe, when it has trivial memory safety issues. You can't claim a language compiles 1.2m LoC in a second, when it takes about 3 seconds to compile 50k LoC. If they said these are the goals for the language in the future, that's a different story but they did not say that. This was 2 years ago, so maybe things have changed and V lang is no longer over promising, but I don't have the stats on hand to back it up and so I remain skeptical. I like the idea of Gitly but I can't trust it does all they claim right now, given V lang's past.
If you have any stats on V lang fixing these issues, I'd honestly love to see them. Being able to deliver on all of these promises, would make V lang an extraordinary achievement.
It's a very large amount for the most talented person to learn, much less build multiple production-grade systems with.
We all should get some grace ofc, but does he also not need to show that he's learned not to make exaggerated claims? Otherwise there is no accountability and someone else gets fucked because they run across a bug because the dev didn't know use valgrind while claiming no memory leaks. I can't like that.
How many people would love to get their service on HN for a few hours?
> It's easy to promote the speed and size of your github alternative when it has a fraction of the features.
I could have said that about Gogs years ago since a high school student made that in their spare time.
Once projects become open-source, the community usually takes over that work. Just like many others, the same could happen to this project, just like how interested contributors did so with the V language as soon as that was open-sourced.
I really don't understand why everyone is making fun of what is clearly a stub implementation. Have we not all written code like this so we can go work on some other part of the code that depends on this?
The languages you've listed generally work as advertised and while you might dislike some of the design decisions or tradeoffs inherent in those decisions, ultimately, they do what they claim to.
>It's easy to promote the speed and size of your github alternative when it has a fraction of the features.
At leat this fraction of features works, what can't be said about gitlab and is only partially true for github. It shows repos, files, commits and what not, what features are missing?
Looks like V author/community is on the track to rewrite the world. Expect operating system stuff next? I'm shocked by how quickly it goes along, though. Gitly is quite usable already, and I appreciate the swiftness.
I'd think that Rust community is rewriting the world, but it's happening at much slower pace. Is V's basis strong enough to do this? Seeing the issues like [1] (about the basic memory management stuff) open makes me suspicious.
Could someone explain to me why, after seeing how many exaggerated claims the author has made, they have invested their time into building up a community around it?
I'd be straight up terrified to trust anything serious with this guy's work.
In this instance, the demo won't even load for me and the documentation page can't be bothered to put the most basic of padding in it. Why even release publicly?
For instance, when asked how the memory management system works, here you see a team member give the standard response: the compiler inserts calls to free when it detects the variable is no longer used. This seems reasonable to anyone who hasn't thought much about PL/compilers before. But when pressed further, you see Alex admit "most stuff is simply cloned ATM" which is in stark contrast to the "autofree handles 90-100% of objects for you" on their homepage.
Or this where Alex shows he has no idea what UB is?
UB is a property of the language's abstract machine. Common C UB like dereferencing a null pointer or signed integer overflow has well defined semantics on basically any commodity hardware manufactured in three decades and yet it is still UB not because of the runtime properties but because the C abstract machine says it can't happen and compilers are free to optimize based on that assumption. For a language that compiles to C and claims no UB, the author should have a much better understanding of this.
I confess that I've found it both enraging and depressing to see that the "bootstrapped-by-hype" model works even in programming language development, which I had (naively, I guess) assumed would be more immune to that sort of thing. I suppose the field is composed of fallible humans just like any other.
It's not even a question of "how bad". There was way too much PR given how immature the project was, at least at the time. I don't think the author had had a lot of experience as a language designer / compiler implementer when the project was started. One advertised feature of the compiler was its supposed simplicity, such as getting along without an AST. I doubt this was a good choice and I think they ended up adding one in.
In my perception it was mostly sold as a piece of engineering by PR like this (quote from OP): Cheapest server $160 $20 $3.50 [2]
"Lots" is very, very subjective. What country do you live in? I would say (as an appreciative donor/patron myself) there has been very, very little in the way of direct donations to the founder himself. This is no "get rich quick" scheme. Frankly I don't know of any programming language that's ever been such a quickie in this regard.
Jobs' engineering team did it when compared with other libs at the time with NextStep. I know devs who claimed they were 3x (or more) more productive than their Windows and other Unix counterparts during that time. Rails arguably brought a similar revolution in the webdev world.
Good luck on your projects! You should probably add Gitea to your comparaisons, at it seems to be the closest to your project (written in Go, lightweight).
Unfortunately this will probably run afoul of Git's trademark:
"In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code."
Unless someone has agreed to a contract binding them to the Git trademark policy, the policy would seem to serve as nothing but a statement as to the Conservancy’s preferences (except where it explicitly permits something, where it may constitute a gratuitous license); what is enforceable is trademark law.
But, for a git-related service offered in commercial trade, there would seem likely to be a trademark violation independent of the policy, so the Conservancy is probably within their rights to enforce the policy in this case.
Not how trademark law is argued I think. Mike Roe Software (mikeroesoft) had a similar challenge. Trademark law is kind of inane but what are you going to do.
So I should be seeing incoming lawsuits for GitLab (Who also acquired Gitorious and Gitter) GitHub, Gitea, GitKraken, Gitcoin, Gitpod, GitSense and a VSCode tool called GitLens?
Why haven't they happened yet?
Downvoters: So you have ALL sources to your claims that these aforementioned Git-related services have the necessary permissions to use the Git trademark from the Software Freedom Conservancy?
I don't want 'probablys' or 'maybes' but full sources to ALL these services that explicitly show the permission granted for using the Git trademark under license.
The thing is, from what I've read, if you were using Git<plus something> before Git started cracking down, they will let it slide. I also think they don't care until you hit it big and cause issues for them.
Only 128MB of RAM? What happens when you try to GC a huge repo? This must mean only the non-git requirements. Under the covers either libgit2 or the git executable are being used, and those will use many resources depending on the operation.
Wow—they weren't kidding when they said fast! It's interesting how I've been conditioned to expect delays on websites—so when I come across something like this which loads seemingly-instantly, it's super noticeable!
anyone here keep up with V and can give a quick rundown of how development of the language has been going? I used to keep up with it out of curiosity but haven't checked in in awhile.
Looking at gitly repository it almost has no features, only a fraction of the basic git features are present, and they are barely working.
Why is it being advertised here on HN as a fast alternative of github/gitlab?
P.S.: Probably the website crashed, it's giving me 502 bad gateway from cloudflare
One thing that is positive is that writing an application in a new language is a 'rubber meets the road' situation where the language is being tested in the real world.
I like the approach that sourcehut took overall. I would like to find a way to implement issue tracking into Git, but the mailing list approach isn't a bad idea.
Yes, but I honestly hate the idea of having to learn yet another SCM. I may reconsider at some point though, especially if more implementations emerge.
It's still not v1 where there would be some sort of backward compatibility guarantee, but it's close if you are using master. Note though that even without that guarantee, there is git-bug-migration to provide you some safety.
There is however some bugs and missing features, as in any software that young with an author busy buying/refurbishing an apartment ;)
Can what this guy is doing be done without making mistakes? Is this thread not good publicity? Does crazy_horse not sound pathetic and amedvednikov comparatively heroic? Could we not dream a little, please?
amedvednikov only sounds heroic if this is first time you've heard about him or the criticisms towards him over the years.
To those who've heard of him before, he's just a conman.
Make no mistake, this is just one of his many "ambitious" projects that he creates for publicity and then abandons after a while. Again, this isn't the first time he does this. He promises the world and under-delivers.
Now, it's time for me to be one of those critics! It's easy to promote the speed and size of your github alternative when it has a fraction of the features. I'll be curious to see where this goes and I think it has some value but only as a way to dogfood V itself.