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wb13579 | 3 years ago

It's because V made impossible promises, and used those to get donations.

For example from wayback machine http://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/d...: "(Work in progress) There's no garbage collection or reference counting. V cleans everything up during compilation. If your V program compiles, it's guaranteed that it's going to be leak free."

When people called him out for this saying that this was impossible he doubled down on it and said that it's fine to say things like that because of the "work in progress", as if it was coming.

It turns out, it was impossible. V eventually had to add reference counting.

The worst part is that he used lies like this to get thousands of dollars from Patreon sponsors.

It seems like he's trying to clean up his act, but he's still making some dubious claims. He claims to have invented an "innovative and flexible memory management" reference counting algorithm that removes 80-90% of overhead. But there's no way to do that with mutable data, as far as i know. And sure enough, it doesn't work, users are still told to use the garbage collection option. If that turns out to be true, I might change my mind, but I fully expect that it's a false promise too.

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gompertz|3 years ago

V backer here. I've never ever felt remotely scammed or deceived. So people who bring up the scamming topic can continue to do so with the imaginary money they did not pledge/donate.

Also I see the Patreon topic a lot - Patreon is not a contract. If one is unhappy they can stop pledging ANY time, immediately. So like it or not, the Patreon support you see is a very accurate representation of satisfied backers as well.

amedvednikov|3 years ago

It does work, and there's a 1.5 year old working demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB8ea8uLsM

0 GC is used.

None of the people who ever donated or are still donating felt they were being scammed. They often write about this here on HN.

wb13579|3 years ago

A demo, sure. But answer us this: does autofree ever crash, and does autofree ever leak?