Does anyone want to reply to this post to give me your 👍 👎 opinions on the "V" programming language or "Taipei Story" by R.F. Kuang

Alternately does anyone know if any of these movies (on the program for a queer film festival running in Toronto over the next week) are likely to be good https://insideout.ca/event/id/69dea0971d7323f9454e69ac/

@mcc hmmm haven't seen any of those

@ireneista a lot of them are probably premiering but i was wondering if there was "buzz"

@mcc The lead developer of V is using Claude to develop it, so that would probably be a 👎️ regardless of anything else about the language.

@danielleigh thanks

@mcc oh dang I haven't heard of V before and it looks really intriguing, especially its autofree engine?! This could actually be the right compromise between GC-heavy systems and the bondage/discipline of Rust's borrow checker. I need to read more about this but my current impression is "not yet, but keep an eye on it because I think it's gonna go places"

@mcc regarding V: it makes (or at least did in 2024) quite a few false claims: https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v (and from 2023: https://n-skvortsov-1997.github.io/reviews/)

@noisytoot @mcc Yeah, V was basically vapourware for years. I'll see if I can find some receipts, but I seem to remember that back around maybe 2018, 2019, it was a running joke that the language's author would see a feature he liked in some other language, and just... claim that V was very close to having it. While in the meantime, the compiler basically couldn't produce an executable that would do much more than “hello world” without segfaulting.

@mcc I've heard good things about We Are Pat, that's one I'm hoping will come to my local queer film festival

@mcc About 5 or 6 years ago I remember being on the lang-dev channel of the Rust community server and everyone hated V because the developer had somehow acquired (VC?) funding for a language that literally compiled to C and maybe (my memory's a bit hazy here) boasted performance and correctness improvements that were unsubstantiated. So it gets a 👎 from me.

To be fair, I haven't checked in to see how it's doing recently.

@noisytoot @mcc Well, that timeline is a bit early because the language apparently wasn't publicly available until early 2019, but I think I'm largely thinking of https://xeiaso.net/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23/. And I'm pretty sure I read https://mawfig.github.io/2022/06/18/v-lang-in-2022.html a few years later.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and nothing is going to be perfect out of the gate, but V was thrown onto the Internet with some pretty dishonest claims about its capabilities. If the LLM use going into making the sausage hadn't already disqualified from use, I would want to see real hard proof that the project is prioritizing safety over iteration speed, and frankness with its community.

@mcc
Is the question about "Taipei Story" a trap for any time travelers? (The book doesn't release until September 2026. 😁)

@roytoo well, i guess that answers my question "wait, how did a new rf kuang book get released without me hearing about it"