dark VS v

Compare dark vs v and see what are their differences.

dark

Darklang main repo, including language, backend, and infra (by darklang)

v

Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io (by vlang)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
dark v
43 219
1,601 35,272
3.1% 0.2%
9.9 9.9
about 21 hours ago 1 day ago
F# V
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

dark

Posts with mentions or reviews of dark. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-24.
  • Darklang
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Dec 2023
  • WASM_of_OCaml
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jul 2023
    Yes. Darklang was originally in OCaml using js_of_ocaml, and we ported it to F# using Blazor (https://github.com/darklang/dark/tree/main/backend/src/Wasm). It works.

    We found that in dotnet 6, the code was much slower, with long startup times and a much bigger download, than in js_of_ocaml. It also had a lot of issues in running in a Webworker, which wasn't the case for js_of_ocaml.

    In dotnet 7, the webworker issues are better and AOT is easier, so startup is faster. Download sizes are still bad, and it's still slower than js_of_ocaml.

    However, dotnet allows almost any code to run in WASM, which js_of_ocaml had large limitations. This meant a decent chunk of functionality had to be worked around to make separate js vs native targets, which also was a massive pain and took a long time. Dune's virtual targets wasn't ready at the time - I think we were one of the test cases for it.

  • It's so unfortunate they decided to go with the Clojure/Haskell type syntax, as opposed to something friendlier like Elixir. A lot of people will not even try this language as a result. [Unison]
    1 project | /r/programmingcirclejerk | 17 Jun 2023
    Why should I use this instead of https://darklang.com/
  • Cloud, Why So Difficult?
    6 projects | /r/programming | 29 May 2023
    First it was probably Dark. They made a lot of noise some years ago, but then I never heard of them again (looking at their current website, looks like they moved on to AI now, obviously).
  • New open-source programming language for DevOps engineers by the creator of the CDK
    11 projects | /r/devops | 15 Apr 2023
    Reminds me of Darklang. Personally, I don't think vendoring cloud services into a language is going to be beneficial. I'm curious how the language deals with vendor updates. Do I have to upgrade the language then? If so, I see a lot conflicts coming from this. Then it comes down to Javascript or HCL, the HCL bit makes me think that the below statement is not as truthy as it is on the surface:
  • Darklang Release 9
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jan 2023
    We still don't have all that many users (~100 active), so I'm not sure you'll find an answer here. But we collect that sort of feedback publicly, which might answer your question: https://github.com/darklang/dark/discussions/categories/feed...
  • Making Something Waspy: A Review Of Wasp
    6 projects | dev.to | 10 Jan 2023
    I wish I could remember what took me to YCombinator's website on the 10th of October, 2022. That was when I first heard about Wasp and another language called DarkLang. After I learned about Wasp, I was intrigued and curious to know how it works, which led me to join the discord server the next day.
  • Using Rust at a Startup: A Cautionary Tale
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Nov 2022
    Some languages that try to integrate an HTTP server and a database:

    Ur/Web: http://impredicative.com/ur/

    Dark (Darklang): https://darklang.com/

  • The Current State of Infrastructure From Code
    6 projects | dev.to | 16 Nov 2022
    There are others in this space I did not assess like Encore, Shuttle, Modal, and Dark. These were not assessed for the sake of time. If you're interested in IfC, I encourage you to take a look at these others.
  • Finally, we have support for negative numbers!
    2 projects | /r/programmingcirclejerk | 4 Nov 2022
    Oh, finally! I was waiting to build my serverless CRUD webapp in Dark (OCaml + JavaScript and Fsharp?) until they had support for returning negative numbers on a GET request!

v

Posts with mentions or reviews of v. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-24.
  • V Language Review (2023)
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Feb 2024
    Their site is clearly showing the language is in beta. The V documentation also states that autofree is WIP, and to use the GC instead. This isn't a corporate created language, but looks to be a true volunteer open source effort from people around the world.

    Their community, in comparison to others, even has their discussions open and open threads for criticism[1]. These

    [1]https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610

  • Towards memory safety with ownership checks for C
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Feb 2024
    V also has this https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/doc/docs.md#embed_fil...
  • Vlang Release v0.4.4
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2024
  • Vox: Upcoming open-source browser engine in V
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
  • Building a web blog in V &amp; SQLite
    1 project | /r/code | 29 Oct 2023
  • bultin_write_buf_to_fd_should_use_c_write
    1 project | /r/programmingcirclejerk | 25 Oct 2023
  • The V Machine Learning Roadmap and Ecosystem
    1 project | /r/programmingcirclejerk | 6 Oct 2023
  • Show HN: A new stdlib for Golang focusing on platform native support
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Oct 2023
    Goroutines was the selling point for me until they decided to introduce telemetry in their toolchain; that was what forced me to stop using Golang as a whole.

    About GC, I would say: if you implement C++'s RAII mechanism to replace garbage collection, then I believe this project will have a bright future.

    My final question is the following: how `pcz` compares to V language, from a syntax's perspective [1]?

    [1] https://github.com/vlang/v

  • Hopefully, the V developers will establish a relationship with Microsoft.
    1 project | /r/programmingcirclejerk | 4 Sep 2023
  • The V Programming Language 0.4
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Aug 2023
    V has the right to exist, have its supporters, and do things its own way. The creator and developers of V, from what I have seen, has always responded well to constructive criticism. Their language has discussions opened at their GitHub, unlike those for various other languages. They even have a thread for what people don't like and want improved about the language[1], again, something many other languages don't have.

    A lot of what was going on initially, was coming from obvious competitors, to include being uncivil, inflammatory, and insulting. The initial "criticism" was not so much that, but false accusations of the language being a scam, vaporware, fraud, or didn't really exist. To include attacks and jealousy about its funding and having supporters. This was not any kind of "valid" criticism, that the creator or contributors of the language could reason about.

    The "criticism" never died down, but rather after V was open-sourced and established itself on GitHub. The initial series of false accusations could not stand nor could the support it was getting be stopped. So, the rhetoric and targets shifted to whatever could be found to go after on the newly released alpha version of the language and its new website. In that new mix of what was being thrown at it, there were indeed some very valid criticisms, as can be found with any new language.

    Constructive and valid criticism, is not the same as insults, trolling, misinformation, rivalry, or false accusations. There is clearly a difference. It's disingenuous to pretend something from one group is the same as the other, or that the intent behind what is being done is not different.

    [1] https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610

What are some alternatives?

When comparing dark and v you can also consider the following projects:

nvim-ts-rainbow - Rainbow parentheses for neovim using tree-sitter. Use https://sr.ht/~p00f/nvim-ts-rainbow instead

zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

Bracket-Pair-Colorizer-2 - Bracket Colorizer Extension for VSCode

go - The Go programming language

unison - A friendly programming language from the future

Odin - Odin Programming Language

nanos - A kernel designed to run one and only one application in a virtualized environment

Nim - Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).

liquibase - Main Liquibase Source

sokol - minimal cross-platform standalone C headers

terraform-cdk - Define infrastructure resources using programming constructs and provision them using HashiCorp Terraform

hn-search - Hacker News Search