- The bad press was because the initial public release on GitHub did not implement most of the things seemed like they're implemented, (Rust like memory safety etc.)
- Over time it actually saw contributions from a lot of people and is kind of decent now, be it not as polished as Go, Rust, D etc.
- It is super easy to use, so kind of attracts an audience.
The bad press was because after some people tried to call them out for not shipping features that were claimed in the release, those people were banned from further contribution/commenting on github.
The first release was just Go's parser ripped out and bolted onto a barebones first year of college level compiler, and touted as "safer than Rust", "compiles in milliseconds", etc. but didn't even have real type-checking at the time, nor did it free memory, and many other basic functionality. Furthermore, I vividly remember the author's Patreon advertised at the top of the page back then, and for a while he raked in a couple thousand dollars a month for it.
However, over the years some actually talented people (and nowadays probably LLMs) have somehow sort of fixed most of the biggest warts, but it's still nowhere near what it advertised in that first release.
What's wild is I was looking at the language's home page again, and looking to find their GitHub, the first GitHub link I noticed, is the GitHub sponsors link.
I don't mind supporting a project like this, but this is a bit excessive.
Was it really Go's parser? That wouldn't surprise me, but also that kind of makes sense to me why it looked a bit 'familiar' in terms of syntax.
It's definitely been "alpha" tier for a while, which it doesnt help that the developer doesn't outline any sort of stability that I can recall (back then at least) which imho if you're publishing a language, you should let the reader know.
It appears you're calling something a scam because an early alpha version was early alpha quality. If so, that would be unprofessional and inflammatory.
I'm open to being wrong. So again, can you explain what you mean?
I have this amazing new thing I'm making, nothing like it, better than everything else. Here's a prototype that does none of that and is _barely_ functional. Care to invest $2000? If so, do I have a bridge to show you...
They haven't had a stable 1.0 release yet, but they've had many pre-1.0 releases. It's not some personal experiment that's been sitting in the dev's Github that people are piling onto; the author has gone out of their way to promote it, beg for donations, and lash out at any criticisms.
The issue has never been the quality of the language per se, the issue has been 1) wildly misrepresenting the quality of the language in the present tense; 2) not even having any kind of a realistic roadmap towards achieving the kind of outsized and implausible claims about the quality of the language; and 3) using these outsized, implausible misrepresentations as a way of soliciting hype and funding for the author.
Defamation? The author's responses and complete lack of honesty certainly made it look like a scam.
The author listed feature after feature that were unfulfilled. Scam is being fairly kind to the project, I thought the guy was the worst kind of liar. You can check out any of the earlier threads on HN to find out for yourself.
It isn't that it was early, it's that it advertised itself to be what it was not. You defending it isn't doing anybody any favors as this is all public record and you're just standing up for a dev that doesn't deserve it
For a long time they did weekly releases, which explains the “hundreds” of releases. It looks like they have made enough progress to move to periodic point releases. (I should probably take another look at it.)
I’m not qualified to judge the language as a whole, at least until I use it for something, but it does have some interesting features. I used to follow their progress, but it’s clear that the pace of development is very slow, like many other niche langs.
The scammy part was definitely making all of the claims as if they were already true. A lot of people sincerely believed it. My recollection was that it took months before some of this was fixed to explain that it wasn't available yet, and then more to explain that it hadn't actually been done yet.
There were some really crazy ones, like that it could convert entire codebases from C++ to V and then compile them some multiple of times faster and make them memory safe. How? I'd love to know.
The author to me seems like they are not attempting to scam people, but it's hard to ignore that they were collecting money, from people who thought they had already accomplished these things, because the person collecting it absolutely appeared to be claiming it.
Now doing that once and going "oops, my bad" would be one thing. There would be no controversy. However, over time it has proven to be a bit of a behavior pattern, which is confusing because the author does appear to be producing things that I think are interesting. Just... often buried under some hyperbole.
It was impossible to verify the "earth shattering claims" of the designer/users early on, and they would be very very emotional every time you just question the metrics. At one point there was a chart that was basically "for a given task, every compiler on earth: 1min, us: 0.1sec"
And whenever you poke you found it seemed to be comparing apple and oranges and conversations often ended in v users crying because "this is a new project !"
(yet, the crowd kept growing and they seemed to have produced larger and larger projects with this thing)
I never paid enough attention to figure out if the drama is justified or not (and don't really care either, please don't try to convince me to care either, don't shoot the messenger).
There’s good kinds of drama (competent dev forcefully rejects bad ideas) and bad kinds of drama (activist/corporate takeovers, subpar dev doubles down on mistakes, etc), but I haven’t been following it, so I have no idea which one this is.
Packt used to give away one book for free every day or something like that years ago. Maybe they still do. I downloaded many of them, and there were a couple of actually good books in the bunch but most of them I found to be too low quality to be worth reading. I came to see Packt as a shovelware place for ebooks. And this was even before LLMs were around. I haven’t visited in years but if I did and it turned out that their current library consists of 99.99% AI written slop it would not surprise me.
I don’t know if your past experience with Packt is similar, or if you saw Packt publishing a book about V as a surprising positive sign for V.
I remember the controversy around the original announcement. It seems quaint now, honestly. Simpler times. Slop by those olds standards is practically the Mona Lisa now.
Huh. Pretty cool. I haven't looked at vnix in a while, and it's been almost as long since I looked at V. It had a lot of controversy early on. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has tried it recently to find out if they ever ended up delivering on their promises.
> QEMU uses macOS hardware virtualization for the ARM64 desktop.
Huh, since when does QEMU support hardware virtualization on Apple Silicon? To the best of my knowledge, among all the VM managers available on macOS (VMware, Parallels, VirtualBox, …) only UTM currently supports hardware virtualization and that's through the Apple Virtualization backend, not through QEMU.
huh, that "minecraft" screenshot is pretty clearly minetest/luanti. the vinix repo has some code at least attempting to do real Minecraft, but does it actually work?
First time I heard about V was because of the Volt desktop chat app: https://volt-app.com/ which seemed attractive at the time. Turns out it was completely closed source and read secrets from local browser's cookie storage without any kind of warning. I've never nope'd out of a program so fast.
There are others in this comment section claiming this language is scam. Seems about right. The entire Vinix page is slop, too.
If I remember correctly the language promised automatic memory management without downsides, but then instead of implementing that magical feature they started working on a GUI library and whatnot. Apparently now they've moved onto a whole OS while the autofree feature is still "experimental"
I don't use it yet but V has pretty much all properties I want from a programming language. I'll check out Vinix, too. I'm almost certain I'll program a significant project in V some time when it has matured a bit more. The fact that users of languages I find useless hate it is also a big plus.
This is the Claude-ism that I despise the most, when it states something that was never asked because it leaked from the prompt/context. Claude's writing has regressed so much, it's only usable for "raw coding" now.
foul | 16 hours ago
It was nice to use when I tried to dabble with it.
Matl | 14 hours ago
- The bad press was because the initial public release on GitHub did not implement most of the things seemed like they're implemented, (Rust like memory safety etc.)
- Over time it actually saw contributions from a lot of people and is kind of decent now, be it not as polished as Go, Rust, D etc.
- It is super easy to use, so kind of attracts an audience.
d-us-vb | 13 hours ago
novacrazy | 16 hours ago
ecto | 16 hours ago
MisterTea | 16 hours ago
novacrazy | 16 hours ago
However, over the years some actually talented people (and nowadays probably LLMs) have somehow sort of fixed most of the biggest warts, but it's still nowhere near what it advertised in that first release.
morpheos137 | 16 hours ago
giancarlostoro | 16 hours ago
I don't mind supporting a project like this, but this is a bit excessive.
Was it really Go's parser? That wouldn't surprise me, but also that kind of makes sense to me why it looked a bit 'familiar' in terms of syntax.
It's definitely been "alpha" tier for a while, which it doesnt help that the developer doesn't outline any sort of stability that I can recall (back then at least) which imho if you're publishing a language, you should let the reader know.
amedvednikov | 12 hours ago
torstenvl | 16 hours ago
novacrazy | 16 hours ago
torstenvl | 16 hours ago
I'm open to being wrong. So again, can you explain what you mean?
novacrazy | 16 hours ago
wk_end | 15 hours ago
They haven't had a stable 1.0 release yet, but they've had many pre-1.0 releases. It's not some personal experiment that's been sitting in the dev's Github that people are piling onto; the author has gone out of their way to promote it, beg for donations, and lash out at any criticisms.
The issue has never been the quality of the language per se, the issue has been 1) wildly misrepresenting the quality of the language in the present tense; 2) not even having any kind of a realistic roadmap towards achieving the kind of outsized and implausible claims about the quality of the language; and 3) using these outsized, implausible misrepresentations as a way of soliciting hype and funding for the author.
torstenvl | 15 hours ago
orangedog | 14 hours ago
The author listed feature after feature that were unfulfilled. Scam is being fairly kind to the project, I thought the guy was the worst kind of liar. You can check out any of the earlier threads on HN to find out for yourself.
It isn't that it was early, it's that it advertised itself to be what it was not. You defending it isn't doing anybody any favors as this is all public record and you're just standing up for a dev that doesn't deserve it
iamnothere | 14 hours ago
I’m not qualified to judge the language as a whole, at least until I use it for something, but it does have some interesting features. I used to follow their progress, but it’s clear that the pace of development is very slow, like many other niche langs.
mrkeen | 15 hours ago
https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v
torstenvl | 15 hours ago
jchw | 14 hours ago
There were some really crazy ones, like that it could convert entire codebases from C++ to V and then compile them some multiple of times faster and make them memory safe. How? I'd love to know.
The author to me seems like they are not attempting to scam people, but it's hard to ignore that they were collecting money, from people who thought they had already accomplished these things, because the person collecting it absolutely appeared to be claiming it.
Now doing that once and going "oops, my bad" would be one thing. There would be no controversy. However, over time it has proven to be a bit of a behavior pattern, which is confusing because the author does appear to be producing things that I think are interesting. Just... often buried under some hyperbole.
0x457 | 14 hours ago
agumonkey | 14 hours ago
And whenever you poke you found it seemed to be comparing apple and oranges and conversations often ended in v users crying because "this is a new project !"
(yet, the crowd kept growing and they seemed to have produced larger and larger projects with this thing)
ape4 | 16 hours ago
embedding-shape | 16 hours ago
I never paid enough attention to figure out if the drama is justified or not (and don't really care either, please don't try to convince me to care either, don't shoot the messenger).
iamnothere | 14 hours ago
orsenthil | 16 hours ago
QuantumNomad_ | 12 hours ago
I don’t know if your past experience with Packt is similar, or if you saw Packt publishing a book about V as a surprising positive sign for V.
IshKebab | 16 hours ago
EGreg | 15 hours ago
But I just released a language called U, and I was surprised to see this one.
https://ulanguage.org
xvilka | 15 hours ago
cestith | 14 hours ago
netbioserror | 15 hours ago
threethirtytwo | 14 hours ago
ursuscamp | 13 hours ago
dang | 12 hours ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
christophilus | 15 hours ago
phoe-krk | 15 hours ago
bflesch | 15 hours ago
dTal | 40 minutes ago
_s_a_m_ | 12 hours ago
bflesch | 15 hours ago
mapcars | 13 hours ago
codethief | 15 hours ago
Huh, since when does QEMU support hardware virtualization on Apple Silicon? To the best of my knowledge, among all the VM managers available on macOS (VMware, Parallels, VirtualBox, …) only UTM currently supports hardware virtualization and that's through the Apple Virtualization backend, not through QEMU.
vluft | 15 hours ago
bluesounddirect | 14 hours ago
zem | 14 hours ago
nosrep | 14 hours ago
WD-42 | 14 hours ago
There are others in this comment section claiming this language is scam. Seems about right. The entire Vinix page is slop, too.
ChoosesBarbecue | 13 hours ago
alpaca128 | 12 hours ago
13415 | 14 hours ago
polotics | 12 hours ago
"That is the whole system, not a stripped-down mode you switch into."
alpaca128 | 12 hours ago
sunaookami | 11 hours ago
ravenical | 12 hours ago
mdtrooper | 12 hours ago
sheepscreek | 8 hours ago
Narishma | 7 hours ago
kovariance | 11 hours ago
calvinmorrison | 7 hours ago