[Xevi]

V looks interesting, and I wish it the very best. However the attitude of the lead developers toward criticism or negative feedback (even if it's not valid) is highly off-putting imo. Everything negative that people say appear to be taken as an "attack", and as far as I've seen they are quick on the trigger in regards to banning or blocking people that they disagree with. And at the very least they just completely disregard all negative feedback as lies, scams, conspiracies, etc.

The responses I've read by the devs are in stark contrast to what I've seen in other languages I use, such as Rust. I hope that as the language evolves, the developers will start reflecting on the way that they interact with others and how it impacts people's view of V. I could never justify using a language like V in production if I couldn't even trust the lead developers to be level-headed during criticism.

I'm sorry for ranting, I really wish the best for V and its maintainers.

[richbell]

> I'm sorry for ranting, I really wish the best for V and its maintainers.

I appreciate you posting this. I like the premise of V and really want for it to suceed, but this is a good summary of why I think so many people dislike V: the lead dev and community do not engage criticism in good faith.

I'm sure V receives its fair share of unwarranted criticism, but a lot of legitimate criticism and questions are either met with a) hostility or b) incredulity, which causes people to dislike the language for fundamental reasons.

Both the creator and community members gaslight (for lack of a better word) and act as if they're happy to receive questions or feedback, but even in this thread you can see people being treated like I mentioned above.

E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947510, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947121, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947014, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947977

[johnfn]

I don't have the time to go through every link, but let's just look at one or two:

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947177

I mean, the article linked at the top is just outrageous - just read through it. For instance, it claims that V misleads by claiming that it has no null. But really what the author has done is found a bug in V that allows a variable to be set to null. A bug that unintentionally leads to creation of null is wildly different than V not supporting non-nullability at all. It'd be like using FFI in Rust to set a non-nullable variable to null and claiming that meant Rust had no type safety. It's absurd.

I can understand the maintainer's frustration.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947212

OP claims V has "huge promises it hasn't kept". V is version 0.3. This seems wildly unfair.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31946715

OP kicks a conversation in poor faith with "Wanna know something funnier also posted in previous thread?" about a V bug - which HN turns a blind eye to - and then suddenly the HN community pounces on the V maintainer when he gets frustrated in return? What?

[amedvednikov]

How's the first link an attack for asking simple questions?

(By the way there's not a single question there.)

[amedvednikov]

Only I can ban, and I haven't banned anyone in 2 years. You can read my comments here about the attacks.

There's actual valid criticism and feedback like in https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/7610

But there's also trolling, harassment, and completely baseless attacks.

[mst]

The way Cadey was treated by your community entirely ended my interest in your language.

[johnfn]

I don't really agree. V seems to attract a much larger than normal swath of people who enjoy trying to score points off of technicalities. e.g. people claiming the entirety of V is an unsafe language because they found a single bug in the compiler, etc. Languages like Rust never garner this sort of point scoring in the comments.

> as far as I've seen they are quick on the trigger in regards to banning or blocking people that they disagree with

Do you have any source for this claim? Without a source this simply reads as another person trying to sow uncertainty and doubt. I haven't seen anyone banned or blocked on Github.

[wb13579]

That's because V already lied once about its memory management, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947048. Any highlighting of that fact is met with deflection and dodging.

V is still making dubious claims: his newly invented autofree isn't stable even today after years and users are encouraged to use garbage collection instead. It's hard to trust that when we've been lied to already.

[richbell]

These aren't mutually exclusive. What isn't captured in individual posts about V is the historical context of previous discussions.

I think many people feel scorned or resentful towards the attitudes, which means they're more likely to speak negatively of it in the future.

When V was first announced, there was a lot of hype about "Volt": a cross-platform Slack app written in V (https://web.archive.org/web/20190315173156/https://volt-app....). It was slated to be released 'soon', but months went by and there was nothing. When it eventually did release, it was nowhere near as complete or polished as people were being lead on to believe. Same thing with V itself, and people were attacked for pointing this out.

There's a long history of over-promising or hyping things that don't exist, and not handling constructive criticism well. So there's a number of people who actively dislike V.

[amedvednikov]

Exactly. The amount of nitpicking is ridiculous.

There's an entire article half of which is about a single checker bug that has already been fixed.

Or claims like "it uses official system api (libc), therefore you can't say it doesn't have dependencies".

[mllllv]

I think the problem initially was that people accused the creator of malice for no reason other than not being more specific about which features were a work in progress. I agree that it's not good to treat every criticism as an attack, but sometimes criticism of V (as an outsider, I've never used it) feels more like anger towards the creator rather than a helpful suggestion. For example, there's a difference between saying "I've found a bug in an advertised feature" and "You're a liar", which is how much of V's critics sound to me.

[corford]

That's not at all the vibe I get from one of the lead devs posting here. I see it more as frustration from dealing with low effort snipes/trolls.

The language used on the main vlang site also seems calm, clear and unsensational (at least to me).

[option_key]

>The language used on the main vlang site also seems calm, clear and unsensational (at least to me).

It wasn't always like this. Back in 2019, its website looked like this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190303184805/https://vlang.io/

As you can see the website claimed that its compiler is "200x faster" than C compilers, while neglecting to mention that it merely translates V code to C, so you still have to run a C compiler.

"400 KB compiler with zero dependencies" (apart from a C compiler and libc).

"As fast as C" - a lie.

Apart from deceptive marketing, there were serious issues with the code quality of the compiler:

https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/d32e538073e55c603992b5b65ebc...

[amedvednikov]

> frustration from dealing with low effort snipes/trolls

That's exactly what it is :)

[bakul]

FWIW, my view is that even the best programmers don't always have perfect non-programming skills and it is better to give them specific objective feedback via bug reports/technical comments etc and not focus on how they are not doing the expected thing or behaving in an expected manner. Focus on and encourage their good work if possible.

[Tozen]

> However the attitude of the lead developers toward criticism or negative feedback...

I disagree about that, because there is a major difference between submitting a bug or disagreeing about a claim or feature versus outright trolling, smearing, instigating drama, or trying desperately to create negative public perception.

Issues and discussions can be brought to V's GitHub (https://github.com/vlang/v/issues, https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions), but instead what various competitors and detractors do is create drama filled smear blogs or bad joke posts (on various websites) against the author or language. That's not any attempt at being helpful or constructive, that's more about slander or to create such negative sentiment in the hope of killing off the language.

When issues and discussions are brought peacefully to V's GitHub, they are discussed and debated intelligently. If any such issues have any validity, then they are usually fixed.

> Everything negative that people say appear to be taken as an "attack"...

That's simply not true. What does happen, is various competitors and detractors do specifically attack and smear the language or author, and who have no intention to want to be helpful or make any improvements. To include engaging in downvoting or trolling those who appear to be V supporters.

Such attacks and smears are not about fixing anything, their point is to be destructive, create negative publicity, and dissuade others from using a rival language.

If there are those that don't think that is the case, then simply ask yourself why many of those engaging in such attacks and smearing who claim to be technically knowledgeable or interested in using the language are not making their case on V's GitHub? That's where a person can go to improve V and get it production ready. Continually engaging in smearing is not about fixing, improving, nor reaching out to V's developers or community.