[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.

[Tozen]

V is not 1.0, so why so bothered that autofree isn't stable enough? Especially if the person is not even using V. Clearly the majority of V supporters and users are not bothered, and are finding V useful to them.

Autofree exists and somewhat works (https://youtu.be/gmB8ea8uLsM), it's a matter of perfecting it so that it requires minimum user knowledge about memory management. You can enable Autofree and use it, but the user must understand what they are doing and reference examples of code and programs that do use it.

So in the mean time, the V developers decided to experiment with and select GC as an alternative memory management method. That should not be a problem for a language in Alpha, nor for anybody "outside looking in", that understands language development. GC usage worked out great for them and the users, so they made it the default. Autofree and manual, would be the other options that users can choose, but they must enable those.

Furthermore, other languages like Nim, have multiple memory management options. I don't see people on HN getting so hot and bothered about that, just for some strange reasons, they seem oddly bothered by V adopting and having multiple options (GC, Autofree, and manual) instead of one.

[johnfn]

What? "After years and years"... It's version 0.3. Not even stable 1.0. The conversation you had with the maintainer puts you in a worse light than him, in my opinion.

[wb13580]

He's already promised something too good to be true and it turned out to be a lie. From wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20190520021931/https://vlang.io/...: "(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."

I was excited for that. We were all excited for that. Then it wasn't true. I would forgive him but he seems to be continuing.

Then he walks that promise back, pretends he never said it and suddenly invents this magical "autofree" system but gives no details on how it works. Rust was never that secretive, it was based on published theory.

He claims it removes 90% of reference counting but if that was possible then Swift or Python or anyone else would have done it.

If it was based on solid precedent, or there was any research, or he published anything about how it works, or he didn't take donations, or it wasn't advertised on the website, it would be fine. But that's not the case.