Our great sponsors
-
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
-
vos
Vinix is an effort to write a modern, fast, and useful operating system in the V programming language
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
nimskull
An in development statically typed systems programming language; with sustainability at its core. We, the community of users, maintain it.
> it's quite impressive for a single author to have a functional, fast language with a working garbage collector and arena allocator (with some issues) in only a few years.
As the included code shows, the gc is boehm gc, and checking their repo shows they just include libgc/bdwgc. This is absolutely not a knock against anyone here, it's just about the standard library for this need, and I think it is a far smarter move to use it than for most to attempt to make their own general-purpose gc.
I feel it would be wrong, however, to characterise this as being a single author having made a language with a gc and arenas, as if those were significant parts of the author's own developments, rather than using a well-picked import and a half-baked implementation of "arenas" are really just a global linked list of buffers, freed only at exit, and so everything leaks [0]. They're not really arenas, you can't use them locally in a region of code or as scratchpads, let alone multi-thread it, so it's just, by their code's own admission, a little pre-allocation to save on mallocs for all the little heap allocations of a GC-assuming codebase, so they're not really arenas like you'd use in C or elsewhere.
Not unimpressive, it's a valid approach for some uses (though not general purpose), it's just different from a language with their own gc and actual arenas. Indeed, just implementing an arena barely even registers in the complexity, I feel, as arenas really should be very simple in most use cases [1]. It would be far more impressive to have them actually integrated and be available as a true alternative to a GC for memory management, particularly integrating common patterns (e.g. [2]) in a way that could serve as a drop-in replacement, such that we can actually provide bounded lifetimes and memory safety without a full GC, let alone support multiple concurrencies with it from multi-threading to coroutines -- this would likely still be unsafe without a GC compared to, say, Rust or Vale, let alone Pony or SPARK, and would likely require a cultural shift in manual management akin to Zig or Odin, as it may be largely moot if dependencies end up enforcing the gc themselves. Still, again, making anything substantial is never unimpressive, we just need to retain the perspective of what was achieved and how.
As to the rest, well, I think it's fair to say that there should be a clear delineation between statements of "we can do this and here's how" and roadmaps with "we're aiming to do these things and here's our current progress". In my experience, people are quick to get these mixed up when they're excited about making something, and none of us are fully immune to this. It's not some moral failing or anything in and of itself, it can very easily be an honest mistake, but humans see patterns everywhere, so we often need to be receptive when others are trying to help us be level-headed and clear things up; otherwise a reputation begins to form. Especially in this industry, reproducibility matters, as we're all too familiar with the smoke-and-mirrors of demos (not to personally claim there is any here, just that it obviously helps dispel such concerns).
And, of course, second chances are always offered if someone is willing to amend mistakes.
[0]: prealloc.c.v is barely over 100 lines long and quite manageable, https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/vlib/builtin/prealloc...
The creator of V made some big claims that raised a few eyeballs, they've gained a reasonable following over the years, have a pretty serious looking website (https://vlang.io) a beer-money level Patreon following and some corporate partnerships/sponsors. However have experienced some pretty brutal takedowns over the years, with some of the bolder claims about the language/compiler being exposed as being.
A word I keep seeing in relation to V is "aspirational" - the project aspires to be a serious language with some major features, so I think it's fair to approach it with a more critical eye than one would a kid's side-project. I think HN would have been pretty understanding if they were open about the state of the various features and were a little less defensive when they encounter articles that treat it like a Real Language and review it as such. If the authors don't want this kind of feedback they can just say front-and-centre (or on their FAQ @ https://github.com/vlang/v/wiki/FAQ) "this is a toy" or "this is pre-alpha"
> Unfortunately there seems to be a big "civil war" happening right now in Nim land
I believe the war is already over, the other side forked the language and seems to move in their own direction to create something new - https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull . That's probably for the better.
I've been around Nim communtiy around a year and I haven't seen any major conflicts break out since these people left. Nim is still actively developed and a jou to use.