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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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 could never find any data on what would allow v to save so much time. i genuinely tried to find objective information, not kneejerk hate. you're the author it seems, so maybe you can give some hints ? i don't believe gcc is the absolute best, but even clang (I didn't check other languages/compilers) was lagging behind in the benchmarks which made me doubt it was not just comparing apple and oranges.
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.
He's emitting C as an intermediate form. I'm asking if the C that's emitted is meeting MISRA or any other recognized standard for secure and robust C code.
you can't have a compiler automatically generate misra C. Because misra is a set of programmer discipline guidelines. How would you automatically convert a program that does dynamic allocation into one that preallocates all memory up front in the init phase?
