About V, the language Volt is written in

by AndyKelley • 7 years ago

570 327 7 years ago

AndyKelley2• 7 years ago

Found this from the Slack thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19081896

Is this language going to be open-source? It seems incredibly impressive, and 100% overlapping with what I'm trying to do with Zig.

ar_lan• 7 years ago

From https://volt.ws/lang:

  > V compiler is written in V. The language will be open-sourced later in 2019.

mmcclure2• 7 years ago

I think /lang may be out of date from the home page. Here's what's on the index:

    > Is Volt open-source?
    > Not at the moment. Due to several reasons, right now the development model is similar to that of Sublime Text. The app is going to be open-sourced in 2021, so you don't have to worry about it being abandoned.

Edit: Just in case people miss the responses, my apologies, this quote may be referring to Volt the app, not the language (V).

dom962• 7 years ago

Very interesting. What I'm curious about is how this language is compiled, the implication seems to be that it gets translated to C/C++ which seems to overlap a lot with what we are doing with Nim :)

strmpnk3• 7 years ago

It seems to be an option to compile to C for platform support, but the page also says:

V is compiled directly to x86_64 machine code (ARM support is coming later) with no overhead, so the performance is on par with C.

Which is interesting. There is a lot more information required still but direct may also imply that it's doing the actual instruction scheduling too rather than relying on LLVM. I'm looking forward to hearing more.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Originally it was compiled to C, now there's also an option to generate machine code directly which improved compilation time by a factor of 10.

eslaught4• 7 years ago

100% overlapping with what I'm trying to do with Zig.

I don't see any mention of meta-programming for V, which seems to be a big emphasis for Zig? This seems like a massive feature that at least I'd care about. I haven't personally had the opportunity to try Zig, but I'm routing for you, so I hope you keep going with the project.

SomethingOrNot6• 7 years ago

*rooting

nickpsecurity3• 7 years ago

To Andy:

I thought it was a new name for Zig seeing your name and the description in the link. ;) It actually looks about too good to be true, especially that it can handle any C++ to V conversion. I was pushing people to check out languages like ZL exactly to rid us of C++ without throwing away legacy code. If it can do that and fast compiles, I can't wait to read the full write-up later on.

Btw, I encourage you to keep at Zig for diversity in systems, language space. Plus, macros. I tell people to avoid them by default for more maintainable code. However, there's times where it's better to have them than not have them. I was happy to see D, Rust, and Julia do macros. Zig and V should have them, too, for max productivity.

To amedvednikov:

1. The name. Although Kesterel had a V language, that was long time ago. You're not stepping on anything. I just encourage you to do one people can spell and pronounce easily that isn't already taken. That will make both search results and adoption a little better.

2. Macros. Like I said above. I saw you mention Go which intentionally tries to keep a standardized language for maintainability and easy compilation. I get that. You could add a warning to the main page that macros are available but discouraged for most situations for those reasons. "Use them only when the cost is worth it." Can just do two passes: one for macros, one for regular code. Your incremental compilation should knock out most of what little slowdown there is.

DubiousPusher2• 7 years ago

Max productivity to the library implementor not to the integrator or maintainer. The number of hours I've spent inlining gross macros so I can debug them has poisoned me against all but the simplest application of them.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

I'm against macros. I've done a lot of research on this topic.

One of the main goals is simplicity and maintainability. I want people to be able to jump into any code base (including stdlib and compiler) and understand what's going on. Macros don't help with that.

I went through like 10 names and ALL of them were taken. There are a lot of programming languages out there :)

AndyKelley2• 7 years ago

Zig and V should have them, too, for max productivity.

Have you read my articles about macros and what Zig does instead?

https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-programming-language-blurs-...

I would be curious to hear your thoughts with this context.

eggy• 7 years ago

It's hard to avoid naming conflict, but there is:

V programming language https://www.vcode.org/

SomethingOrNot6• 7 years ago

Btw, I encourage you to keep at Zig for diversity in systems, language space.

I don’t think that “Basically like C but a tiny bit better” deserves to be associated with the word “diversity”.

dna_polymerase3• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure none of V will deliver on its promises. Wouldn't be surprised if nothing came out of the announcement at all. Author seems to have a history of big claims and vanishing shortly after. Also details on implementation specifics here in the comments don't make him sound like someone who has an idea of the internals of a compiler or programming languages.

emmelaich• 7 years ago

Can you give some citations / references?

FTR, I found his (former?) eul\.im which now redirects to some fishy website.

habosa• 7 years ago

I also found Volt in that thread and have been reading about V ever since. Thanks for posting!

cschep• 7 years ago

100+ MB down to 5 MB is such a nice win, it's amazing that the author even bothered to continue from 5 MB down to 100 KB. Very impressive!

MuffinFlavored2• 7 years ago

Is Volt WebKit or not? I can't tell...

saagarjha3• 7 years ago

It doesn't look like it.

blattimwind• 7 years ago

Cramming WebKit into 100 kB seems technically impossible, unless those 100 kB contain "git clone ; ./configure; make -j32 /wait three hours/".

MuffinFlavored2• 7 years ago

I totally agree. So what does "Slack support" mean? Is he... implementing the Slack API? and Skype? and Gmail? and Discord? and Facebook Messenger?

Edit: I see now. It's just a chat app with a bunch of protocols and a clean interface.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

No it's 100% native. Initially it used to download CEF for authorization. The worst decision I ever made :)

edgarvaldes• 7 years ago

I like to know that there are still developers for whom the size of an application is an important issue.

ilrwbwrkhv• 7 years ago

and thats why im gonna patreon the shit out of him. we need more heroes like this.

themodelplumber• 7 years ago

Going a bit more abstract, it's a good idea to do this with mental models, too--the programming languages of the mind. Many of us are heavily burdened in our problem-solving long before we fire up our text editor, because our mental model for exactly what it is we are doing is extremely sloppy and rich with unnecessary dependencies.

A lot of people continually tinker with mental models that are into the Gigabyte-equivalent range in terms of all they intend and promise to do. One example here on HN might be the "startup" model. What "it" is seems pretty fluid at this point and in various discussions it gets mashed and molded to fit this concern or that one. Better models will come along that will solve problems nobody can yet put their finger on. (I'm speaking in the abstract here, but I've experienced and worked heavily on this kind of model-change and it can be very valuable.)

What typically happens is, someone comes along and isolates an issue which promises high leverage or high controversy or both, brings a set of problems into really sharp relief and remains in the needed context without the burden of supporting and interlinking with every other context out there, and voila--a powerful solution emerges in a very efficient way. Pretty soon everybody who needed a [startup] mindset now needs a [successor-lens] mindset. And not just in name--it's clear that this can really help. It's good stuff.

It's really just more of what we call "technology" and is observable in the same sorts of curves, but again, there's a model that's overburdened--the technology of the mind still overlaps with and rubs against what we consider "true" technology of the "useful arts" sort. As a civilization we suffer, mostly unknowingly, under the burden of yesterday's thinking about how things fit or don't fit into which categories.

ci5er• 7 years ago

The SS-ci5er is here to take the call.

This is "the deal"...

There are many computer environments beyond the desktop and cloud servers. Arguably most computer environments.

But to reduce it: imagine an O&G pipeline controller that stupidly did something bigger than QNX & C. That will be pumping oil and gas for 30 years. Online upgrades, until some young turk blows out the library size. Oil spill with a blown line, and New Jersey explodes.

eridius3• 7 years ago

Those systems aren't running desktop applications though.

UncleMeat• 7 years ago

Android developers. APK size is still a big problem.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

I always hated how bloated Android / Java are.

Now that I have experience with translating C/C++, it would be really cool to translate existing Android Java apps to V. This would talk more than a year probably...

johnt15• 7 years ago

It's interesting that the roadmap of volt has been saying v1.0 is just around the corner for the past half year. The other roadmap items also don't change much.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180615121501/https://volt.ws/

https://web.archive.org/web/20181023093131/https://volt.ws/

It would be great if the roadmap contained realistic items. Once a user is burned by an unmet expectation he won't believe anything else on the website.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Yes, I've done a terrible job with estimations and for 9 months I lived in "release tomorrow" mode.

I made lots of mistakes that caused the delay, I'll post a detailed blog about it.

Should have sticked to "it's ready when it's ready".

Ironically this time it it really is going to be released tomorrow (Feb 7).

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

macOS version has just been released. Windows version will be released later today.

User234• 7 years ago

When you figure out how to do a good job with estimations that can be another post, because I still haven't figured that out. It's way easier to reason about programming language semantics than to guess how long a reference implementation will take.

adamrezich2• 7 years ago

please don't take this the wrong way but I'm almost more excited to read blog posts about your process and what you've learned than I am for the eventual product, or language used to create the product (though I am excited for both of those!). reading experiences people had trying crazy new stuff is more interesting than results of trying crazy new stuff imo

thecupisblue• 7 years ago

Yesterday, I was in my Applications folder and deleted an old version with an "ahh too bad this never lived". Now, a new story. Thanks, can't wait to read more about it!!

SiVal3• 7 years ago

My two biggest questions about V are 1) How is memory managed?, and 2) How is concurrency done?

"V has no runtime". No GC, but you don't have to manually release memory, like Rust but much easier. Sounds great. How?

And "no race conditions ever" and "everything is thread safe". You can do that with "no runtime" fairly easily if there's no goroutine-style concurrency. I didn't see any mentioned, but I could have easily missed it.

Those two aspects of the language are fundamental enough that I would certainly want to read about them near the top of any overview of the language.

kazinator• 7 years ago

No GC, but you don't have to manually release memory, like Rust but much easier.

That description could fit Fortran 77.

floofy222• 7 years ago

You don't need destructors to release resources if you never release them.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Good question. I haven't mentioned memory management because it's not done yet. I know for sure there won't be a GC or reference counting.

I want to do something similar to Rust's approach, but much much simpler. It's not an easy task.

Right now the language handles very simple cases. Small strings are placed on the stack, local variables that are not returned are clean up automatically.

Globals are not allowed, function args can't be modified, so that helps a bit.

ncmncm• 7 years ago

No GC means you can have destructors, and they can manage resources other than memory, too.

pulse7• 7 years ago

No GC, no reference counting, no manual memory management... Hmmm.... Not everything can be managed by RAII/SBRM... Let say I have a function which loads a complex document (like spreadsheet), does some changes, saves the document and then exits. Who will dispose this complex, dynamic document from the memory? This is the CORE question! If there is a no GC, no RC, no manual management solution to this, then I AM REALLY INTERESTED to know about it...

ojosilva• 7 years ago

+1 for well-defined concurrency.

To me the central concurrency scheme is one of the defining features of a modern language. Go and goroutines, ES/Node and event-driven paradigms, Java and threads... That does not mean a language can't handle many types of concurrency, but it's good to be opinionated on a preferred concurrency scheme from the get-go and have native methods for dealing with intercommunication (ie. Go's channels).

SiVal3• 7 years ago

I'm liking Go's built-in, lightweight goroutine approach a lot more than the other "afterthought" approaches, but I think you need a runtime to dynamically allocate the goroutines and adapt flexibly. I don't want to write one myself or link to some library. If V doesn't have some goroutine equivalent (or better) built into the language, I probably won't be persuaded by its other features. Sending bits of code off to do their various jobs concurrently with (almost) the ease of calling functions sequentially would be hard to give up.

elcomet2• 7 years ago

Volt looks amazing. I've been looking for a native IM app for a while, and I couldn't find one. I hate all those electron or browser apps taking hundred of MB of ram just to display messages.

I hope it succeeds and is released soon! Thank you very much for your work.

vanderZwan3• 7 years ago

I'm not sure I get what is going on in the live reloading code.. if you update the draw function to change colors, then why does the block only change colors when it hits the edge of a screen?

[0] https://volt.ws/img/lang.webm

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Good catch!

It should be instant. But when I was making this gif, there was some kind of a bug, and I some how made it work only after it reaches the edge.

I was not able to reproduce this :)

I'll make a better gif once the new website is up.

didip• 7 years ago

Wow, I like the selling points:

* Strong modular system and built in testing.

* Global state is not allowed.

* There's no null and everything is automatically initialized to empty values. No more null reference crashes.

* Variables are immutable by default and functions are partially pure: function arguments are always immutable, only method's receiver can be changed.

* Thread safety and guaranteed absence of data races. You no longer have to constantly ask yourself: "Is this thread safe?" Everything is! No perfomance costs either. For example, if you are using a hash map in a concurrent function, a thread safe hash map is used automatically. Otherwise a faster single thread hash map is used.

* Strict automatic code formatting. It goes further than gofmt and even has a set of rules for empty lines to ensure truly one coding style.

Especially eye catching is the 2 mode of every data structure. Switch to thread-safe if there are concurrent access.

duncan-donuts• 7 years ago

For no null is he saying that everything is just initialized to a default value (int=0, str=“”, etc)? I’m thrown off by, “everything is initialized to empty values” because I don’t see how empty and null are different.

eridius3• 7 years ago

The difference is all values are valid. In C, you can't know that a `char *` is safe to dereference.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Right, the only syntax for variable declaration is a := val, so you are forced to initialize variables.

rafaelvasco7• 7 years ago

Sounds too good to be true. If this is released it'll be serious competition to Rust, Nim, Zig, etc. Lets hope for the best. There's just so many amazing features. There's even a graphics library in it.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

I'm very excited about it. I've been working on this and Volt full time for a year.

rafaelvasco7• 7 years ago

Very good to know! Keep going strong !

mruts• 7 years ago

How exactly is this a serious competitor to Rust? The guarantees volt is (claiming) to make are nothing compared to Rust. I'm not saying this is bad (Rust is pretty rigorous and hard to code in), but I don't really think they are comparable.

It does seem similar to Nim and Zig, I just think Rust is in a different category from almost all other languages all together.

pcwalton• 7 years ago

V is compiled directly to x86_64 machine code (ARM support is coming later) with no overhead, so the performance is on par with C.

Direct compilation to x86-64 machine code does not get you performance on par with C (by which I assume the author means GCC or Clang). The optimization pipelines of GCC and Clang have had decades of work put into them by some of the best compiler engineers in the world.

Since the author states that the compilation time is linear, this would seem to imply that a full suite of optimizations are not being done, since many optimizations done by GCC and Clang have nonlinear complexity. It is easy to get fast compilation if you don't perform optimizations.

- Thread safety and guaranteed absence of data races. You no longer have to constantly ask yourself: "Is this thread safe?" Everything is! No perfomance costs either. For example, if you are using a hash map in a concurrent function, a thread safe hash map is used automatically. Otherwise a faster single thread hash map is used.

This description doesn't guarantee freedom from data races. (Java's memory model basically fits this description, for instance, except for the specific case of hash tables, which aren't built into the language.) Even if it did, the tricky part is determining what a "concurrent function" is. The obvious ways one might imagine doing this tend to fall down in the face of higher-order functions.

ww5203• 7 years ago

GCC/Clang will definitely optimize better. One way to piggyback on those is for V to spit out C code and let GCC/Clang to do the hard work to produce production mode code, while V can still do fast compilation for development mode code.

rohan1024• 7 years ago

Author added the same thing to description after his comment here

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Yes, you are right. I had a mental note to update the description, I never expected this to be posted on HN so early :)

Just updated it:

V is compiled directly to x86_64 machine code (ARM support is coming later). There's also an option to generate C code to support more platforms and achieve better performance by using sophisticated GCC/clang optimization.

paulddraper• 7 years ago

Thanks!

kupiakos4• 7 years ago

Why not output to LLVM code instead of C?

DaiHafVaho• 7 years ago

As an (anonymous) programming language designer, a few bits of feedback.

First, nice concept, but without open code, it might as well not exist, and without open specification, it might as well be yours alone, like one of Tolkien's languages. Closed languages wither and die, and yours seems well onto that path.

Second, what makes V compelling to you appears to be completely uninteresting to me in terms of language design. It might as well compile from V to Go; I can't see why not!

Whenever a language designer appeals to simplicity, they are usually appealing to whatever makes it possible for them to be productive, and they are usually missing that the productivity is personal because the designer is the one who builds the language. The GL demo seems to be a great example of this sort of situation.

I hope that you publish your work so that we may properly critique it.

Edit: Here is another language designer who is not me saying "closed languages die" (https://blog.golang.org/open-source). I think that, until we actually have a compiler for V (or whatever it is hopefully renamed to before release) in our hands, we ought to be extremely careful about trusting that any of this exists. It is all too common in PLT/PLD for somebody to come in with bold claims, outrageous mockups, and zero toolchain. I addressed what I saw, which is yet another compiles-to-Go hobby language. To become more than that requires a committed community and a common repository of open code, and the author appears to have only the former.

asdfasgasdgasdg2• 7 years ago

I hope that you publish your work so that we may properly critique it.

I don't know about this author, but for me, this would emphatically not be a motivating reason to publish my work. I might publish work so that someone could get some use out of it, or to show off my brilliance. But if all you're going to do is critique it (no doubt with all the familiarity born of five minutes of looking at the tutorial), then I'd just as soon you never see it.

Here is another language designer who is not me saying "closed languages die" (https://blog.golang.org/open-source).

I don't think the person you're quoting would advocate that languages must start out as open source. Go sure didn't. It was developed closed source within Google for two years before it was even announced.

doesnt_know• 7 years ago

I guess it depends on how the critique is delivered. I would unironically love it if an expert level in [repo language] would come along and critique my open source code.

If they were an arrogant shit-head then I'd probably just block them, regardless of the technical merit of what they wrote.

wilg• 7 years ago

It's not necessary for it to be a general purpose programming language, though. I think it is kind of neat to have a very specific, personal language that fits your mental model. On a larger team, probably not what you want, but there are other languages that are optimized for that.

Basically you're right if the creator wants a widely-adopted general-purpose language. But there's other valid approaches I think.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Like it says on the website, the language will be open-sourced later in 2019.

ww5203• 7 years ago

Closed languages wither and die, and yours seems well onto that path.

This is unnecessary harsh. The author has already said it will be open sourced later. I can understand the reasons to not open source now. Managing an open source project is no small work.

Second, notwithstanding V's slim feature set, it's already more successful than 99% of language design attempts out there in that it ships. It certainly succeeds in letting the author to build his other projects faster and easier. It fulfills the author's own needs. I'm sure Perl and Python started that way.

kkarakk2• 7 years ago

look at the authors comments in this thread, he's been known to miss deadlines before. open sourcing is probably gonna be really really delayed

dom962• 7 years ago

It is all too common in PLT/PLD for somebody to come in with bold claims, outrageous mockups, and zero toolchain

This. It's crazy to me how quickly developers are ready to get behind something without even being able to use it. Jai is similar in this regard.

It's easy to make wild claims like "super fast compilation" or "can be translated from C++" when you don't have hundreds of users, all finding edge cases and wanting different things. Especially easy when you haven't released anything so everybody is projecting their favourite features onto the language.

avisaven• 7 years ago

I had been looking for this exact project, but I couldn't remember its name for the longest time. But I remember that home page exactly. Doing a bit of seraching it turns out volt.ws appears to be a rebranding of a previously posted [1] Eul (eul.im), posted by alex-e (whom I assume is its author). Either way, volt.ws and the associated V language sound quite interesting, I look forward to hearing more about this in the future.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778263

snissn• 7 years ago

Hey! I just wanted to see keep it up and that this looks really cool

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Thanks!

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Hi,

Developer here. I was going to post this here in a couple of weeks after launching the product and creating a separate site for the language with much better information about it.

I'd also like to hear your opinion about not allowing to modify function arguments except for receivers. This is an idea I got that isn't really implemented in any language I know of.

For example: mut a := [1, 2, 3]

So instead of multiply_by_2(&a)

we have to return a new array (and this will later be optimized by the compiler of course)

a = multiply_by_2(a)

I think this will make programming in this language much safer, and the code will be easier to understand, since you can always be sure that values you pass can never be modified.

For some reason all new languages like Go, Rust, Nim, Swift use a lot of mutable args in their stdlibs.

You can still have methods that modify fields, this is not a pure functional language, because it has to be compatible with C/C++:

fn (f mut Foo) inc() { f.bar++ }

calebwin2• 7 years ago

Isn't the main reason why languages like Go and Rust don't do that because it would produce a ton of memory garbage?

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

It will be optimized by the compiler.

nicoburns3• 7 years ago

I think Rust and Swift's approach of approach of making the user explicitly annotate (both at function definition time and a call time) these kind of parameters works pretty well.

I think you're right that it can often be an antipattern. But there are also use cases (usually for performance reasons), and the real problem occurs when you are not expecting the modification to happen. If the parameter is annotated then it's obvious that it might be mutated, and less of an issue...

P.S. Looking forward to the open source release. This langiage looks pretty nice/interesting to me, but there's no way I would invest time into learning a closed source lanaguage.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

I don't think it's possible to have a closed source language in 2019 :) It will be released with an open source this year.

rafaelvasco7• 7 years ago

This. Letting the user annotate it is better then enforcing a behavior that is adequate in some scenarios but awkward in others. For gamedev for example, generating copies at game loop is only acceptable for small objects like Vectors and if they're allocated in the stack for example. Even if the compiler optimizes it, it is better to express the intent clearly in the code.

physguy1123• 7 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm the target audience for this (low-latency trading), but here's my thought - code which would allocate in a fast path is a strict no-go for me, and this runs fairly close to that in a few regards:

It seems easy to accidentally make allocating code allocate by changing some variable names (b = fnc(a) - oops, allocation)
I would be extremely wary of trusting a compiler to realize what sort of allocations are optimizable and not - I already have problems with inlining decisions, poor code layout, etc in fairly optimized c++/rust code compiled by gcc+llvm.

Replace allocation with any other expensive work that duplicating a datastructure would result in, and you have the same story. I suspect many of the people that would be evaluating this compared to C/C++/Rust have similar performance concerns.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Thanks for your input. I'll do more research on this.

gcb0• 7 years ago

You need to stop pretending they are not globals. Just accept you work on one continuous memory patch and are simply passing pointers around. If you don't lie to yourself, you can't shoot your own foot when the compiler do not see your lie.

skybrian• 7 years ago

If you can't mutate an argument, does that mean you can't call any of the argument's methods that mutate it, either?

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Right.

jonhohle• 7 years ago

    > This is an idea I got that isn't really implemented
    > in any language I know of.

Is this different than an arg declared as a const reference in C++. Or since fields are still mutable, like `final` arguments in Java?

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

I think yes, it's like declaring every single argument as const.

rurban• 7 years ago

pass by copy is a traditional safe mechanism in functional languages, esp. for multithreading. It can also be made fast enough.

dnautics• 7 years ago

Keep in mind that many of these functional PLs encourage datatypes like first class linked lists that make this copy semantic very fast.

henrikeh• 7 years ago

In Ada, procedure and function arguments must be annotated with whether they are “in”, “out”, “in out”. “In” can never be modified, “out” has no initial value and “in out” has both initial value and can be modified.

Overall if you don’t know Ada I’d recommend that you take a look at the features of it. It has very similar design goals as your V.

milancurcic• 7 years ago

Pure functions in Fortran do this.

petre• 7 years ago

Also D with the immutable type qualifier.

https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#pure-functions

fooker2• 7 years ago

(and this will later be optimized by the compiler of course)

Do not underestimate this part. It can take a surprising amount of effort to get these things right and performant.

GrayShade• 7 years ago

http://wiki.c2.com/?SufficientlySmartCompiler

runeks2• 7 years ago

I wanted to ask OP about this part specifically, so I’ll write my questions here.

a) how do you plan to do this?

b) will the optimization still kick in if you name the return value something else than “a”?

c) what if “a” is an argument passed to the function that calls “multiplyBy2”? Then doing an in-place update would modify the value of “a” for some other function that has also been passed “a” as an argument.

robobro• 7 years ago

ever studied Limbo? look at Limbo instead of Go.

register3• 7 years ago

This is exactly what I was looking for. There's no real option for a language that allows interactive coding and it's easily embeddable. Please open source asap. You will get contributors starting with me.

laumars2• 7 years ago

I’m not taking anything away from the goals of this project but I do feel it’s worth mentioning that there actually are lots of languages that offer interactive coding and are embeddable. Eg JavaScript, Python, LISP, Perl, Lua, etc. Heck, even BASIC fits that criteria.

I do wish the author the best with this project though. Plus designing your own language is fun :)

lucas_membrane2• 7 years ago

Ada does not allow functions that alter parameters for their callers (out mode parameters).

Straw• 7 years ago

Although you can certainly go the pure functions route, I wouldn't recommend it for performance.

There's a false dichotomy between functions and methods, which are simply (sometimes dynamically dispatched) functions with a special first argument. If you allow mutable first arguments, why not any argument?

Instead of the language deciding what's mutable and not, I'd rather have a const system like C/C++ to ensure that changes aren't happening behind the programmer's back.

coldtea8• 7 years ago

Hello, this is an excellent language! Have been looking for something like this for a long time!

Re: "not allowing to modify function arguments except for receivers" -- maybe instead all fields const by default, but having something like an optional mut modifier?

A quick question, how does hot reloading work (with presumably AOT compilation and no runtime)?

(Perhaps there's a OS mechanism to change already loaded code in memory that I should know).

masklinn4• 7 years ago

For some reason all new languages like Go, Rust, Nim, Swift use a lot of mutable args in their stdlibs.

Both Rust and Swift require specifically opting into parameter mutation (respectively `&mut`[0] and `inout`) and the caller needs to be aware (by specifically passing in a mutable reference or a reference, respectively), only the receiver is "implicitly" mutable, and even then it needs to be mutably bound (`let mut` and `var` respectively).

Inner mutability notwithstanding, neither will allow mutating a parameter without the caller being specifically aware of that possibility.

The ability to mutate parameter is useful if not outright essential, especially lower down the stack where you really want to know what actually happens. Haskell can get away with complete userland immutability implicitly optimised to mutations (where that's not observable), Rust not so much.

[0] or `mut` in pass-by-value but the caller doesn't care about that: either it doesn't have access to the value anymore, or it has its own copy

IshKebab• 7 years ago

I think it would be a bit weird if fields of structs can be modified, but bare values can't. Kind of feels like the inconsistency between `Integer` and `int` in Java.

So I would say that having to explicitly mark function parameters as mutable (like in Rust) is a better approach.

whalesalad• 7 years ago

Yes. Don’t mutate in place :thumbsup:

akrymski2• 7 years ago

I actually think having different models (functional and imperative) just adds to confusion. I don't think immutability is all that useful personally, unless the language is purely functional to begin with. I'd keep it simple and stick to C as much as possible.

Why not go the other way and pass everything as a reference? After all that's what Java does, and that's how you'd pass any struct in C anyway. It's a rare case when I need to forbid the calling function to not modify an argument for whatever reason or because I don't trust it - in that case you can make a copy beforehand or use a const modifier. But in most cases I'd expect functions to modify the memory that I pass in, instead of allocating and returning new structures.

Why not have a simple `class` construct as in JavaScript? Keeping functions together in a class is very convenient and means you don't have to pass the struct as the first argument each time. That way `Array` can be a class, and would always be passed by reference. No ambiguity there, class instances are always mutable. Everyone is already familiar with it, it works.

A class method can simply map to a global C function: ``` ClassName_MethodName(*self, ...) ```

As an aside, using a syntax that people are already familiar with (and APIs!) would be great, and make something like this instantly usable. JavaScript has a fairly small core API which would be easy to emulate for example.

boomlinde2• 7 years ago

Why not have a simple `class` construct as in JavaScript? Keeping functions together in a class is very convenient and means you don't have to pass the struct as the first argument each time.

This already seems to have a way to associate functions with data structures, in the same way that methods are done in Go, via a "receiver" before the function name

Eg.

    type Something{}
    fn (self mut Something) method() { ... }

and calling the method with an instance

    x := Something{}
    x.method()

js2• 7 years ago

I have a possibly unhealthy obsession with using namedtuples in my Python and so this pattern appears frequently in my code:

    object = object._replace(foo=1)

But I usually encapsulate the _replace call in the class so it's more like:

    object = object.update_foo(1)

I personally find it can make the code easier to understand, like you say, but it seems like you're getting a lot of disagreement from the other comments.

masklinn4• 7 years ago

I personally find it can make the code easier to understand, like you say, but it seems like you're getting a lot of disagreement from the other comments.

The disagreement they're getting is not on the use of immutability and pure transformations, it's on the fantasy that a "sufficiently smart compiler" would be able to optimise this (especially non-trivial versions of this) into mutations under the cover.

Furthermore, V is apparently supposed to be a fairly low-level language, if you have to rely on the compiler to perform the optimisation, can't statically assert that it does so[0] and it fails to, that is extremely costly in both "machine" time and "programmer" time (as you'll start wrangling with the compiler's heuristics to finally get what you need).

If you want immutability, do it, but do it properly: build the runtime and datastructures[1] and escape hatches which make it cheap and efficient, don't handwave that the compiler will solve the issue for you.

[0] and if you are you may be better off just adding mutation to the language already

[1] non-trivial immutable data structures are tree-based and translate to a fair number of allocations, you really want an advanced GC

boomlinde2• 7 years ago

I'm thinking that it's easy to make a mistake that would prevent the optimization from happening, so I'd personally much rather be explicit about mutability than betting on having satisfied the optimizer.

This looks like a really interesting project, and I look forward to trying it out!

friday99• 7 years ago

What about the case of multiple outputs? It's traditional to have functions that take other mutable arguments to store different auxiliary return values in. So, with this proposal, you couldn't do that and would have to construct random blobs to store all return values and then unpack them.

masklinn4• 7 years ago

…

That's a solved problem, the "random blobs" is called a tuple. Or, since the language is inspired by Go, you can have bespoke multiple return values instead of a reified generic structure.

potta_coffee• 7 years ago

Volt looks like a cool app, I'll be trying it out this week.

duked3• 7 years ago

I really would love an alternative to the horrible Skype client but I doubt it. AFAIK, you can't make your own unless things have changed ?

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Check it out tomorrow :)

duked3• 7 years ago

I will for sure. Their latest client is just too hostile.

chubs• 7 years ago

This is a helpful approach for embedded platforms: Write in a nice language (V), spit out C code that the usually-old embedded toolchain can compile.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

And you can also do C++ => V => C :)

bogdanoff_22• 7 years ago

Do you have anything to say about C++ => V translation?

From what I know C++ is an extremely complex language. How do you deal with the complexity? (Especially considering V is meant to be simple)

magicalhippo• 7 years ago

From what I could see V does not have templates, so that means you instantiate the templates as part of the conversion to V?

How does the resulting V code look like for non-trivial templated code, say something you'd find in one of the more complex Boost libraries?

mathgladiator2• 7 years ago

Awesome, I love to see new programming languages in action. This is great. Some thoughts.

First, ignore negativity and focus on getting constructive feedback. One of my tiny regrets is that I abandoned one of my projects due partially to negative energy. Many years ago, one of my projects was shared here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226480 ), and the feedback was kind of a buzzkill (especially since I wasn't the one sharing it).

Second, think about the growth you want. While I could ignore the buzzkill and keep the faith, I used my language to put a real product out into the world. The crazy thing is that I got it working and working very well, but when it came to hire. It was a cluster fuck. I should have spent a bunch more time on documentation and examples, but I had other concerns that were higher priority. I ultimately had to abandon the whole thing, and I just rewrote everything in C# and used Mono. It was painful, but the company was able to grow faster since the tools were somewhat standard and a plethora examples for the new hires.

When I look back, I was onto something. If I had kept the faith and pushed through, then I would have created something very similar to HHVM which Facebook uses. My strategy back then was to create a less awful language, improve it, then port the platform bits to a better ecosystem and preserve the "business logic".

My core advice with the programming language side of the house is to find a partner for you to lead/follow with shared values. Make it open source as soon as possible, don't wait.

sandov• 7 years ago

It's not garbage collected, right?

mattbreeden• 7 years ago

Correct. There's some more details in this (unfinished) article: https://volt.ws/game

jagger27• 7 years ago

This is the most exciting software announcement I have seen in a while. I can't stand using Facebook Messenger in Firefox.

I'd love to see how V generates its machine code. Using the Go syntax is a wonderful idea.

ilovecaching2• 7 years ago

To the problem you were originally trying to solve, why not just use Rust? Go and C are really about as related as Java and C. Rust would have met all your requirements, and has a lot of features you added to V to begin with.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Slow compilation. Complexity.

ilovecaching2• 7 years ago

That's strange, I find Rust to be much less complex than working with C++ or C. It keeps track of all the tough bits for me, and it has all of the nice expressive stuff from Haskell. With Go I kept running into cases where the language simply had no feature to save me from multiplicative complexity in my code base.

I haven't had any problems with build times thus far, how big is your project?

bogdanoff_22• 7 years ago

Why not Pascal?

kilowatt• 7 years ago

Looks a bit like Odin (https://odin.handmade.network/) --a language explicitly designed to be small and simple I've been enjoying learning and toying around with.

legostormtroopr• 7 years ago

So Volt seems interesting, but how to I download it?

All of the download links just give todays date and issues in the GitHub page the site links to mention it being flagged by virus or not being supported.

https://github.com/voltapp/volt/issues

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

I've just released a macOS beta. Windows and Linux will be released later today.

forhadahmed• 7 years ago

I see Go-ish syntax in some of the examples but I also see underscore_case being used (instead of camelCase)

Does V encourage one or the other? (coming from a C background, I prefer underscore_case)

Does V have Go's funny "uppercase export" rule? Only identifiers that start with an uppercase letter are exported from a module?

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

V is very strict. There's only one style. Using anything other than the underscore case is a compilation error.

It doesn't have the uppercase export rule.

It's going to be either Rust's `pub` or Oberon's `*` or `+`, haven't decided yet.

rafaelvasco7• 7 years ago

Yes, snake_case is the superior naming system imo. Only problem is that each underline required two keysrokes. Maybe using keyboard macro or something would help.

User234• 7 years ago

I'm a big fan of what they are doing, but this is really light on details. Please show us more!

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

You can follow the project here:

https://github.com/vlang-io/V

https://vlang.io

dang3• 7 years ago

Making a programming language specifically for the needs of one program, then developing that language and the program together, is an underestimated strategy. I believe the world would be more interesting if more people applied it—because then we'd get more qualitatively different new systems. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may not be something people currently believe about natural language but for sure it's true about programming: the language you program in conditions what you think, which conditions what program you write. When the two evolve together, evolution can go to new places.

This strategy is time-honored in the Lisp world, where making a language and writing a program are more intertwined, and the cost of making a language much lower, than they usually are.

eckza• 7 years ago

What I took away from this, is “everyone should learn a Lisp dialect ASAP”.

dang3• 7 years ago

Not necessarily. It's easier in Lisp, and a decades-long tradition, but Lisp is not even the only language of which that's true—there's also Forth. And there are many opportunities to apply this approach beyond those two. The more the better, because each qualitatively different starting point will lead to qualitatively different systems.

The software ecosystem is not well served by everyone being focused on the same few familiar programming approaches. Sure there are economies of scale—better tooling, programmer fungibility—but there is less intellectual diversity. More people should realize the tradeoffs here: yes you lose a lot when you start making your own language, but you also gain a lot. The program you're trying to write becomes more writeable. If that doesn't sound significant, it's because we're so conditioned to think the other way. There's another advantage, too: it's deeply intellectually rewarding. That provides staying power to work on significant projects over the long haul and is a solid motivation to do something many people think is crazy.

jacobolus• 7 years ago

Or OMeta http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/ or Ohm https://github.com/harc/ohm or the like

omeid23• 7 years ago

The downside to this is that unless your language gets widespread adoption, you can corner your community into a bubble and drastically increase the barrier to contribution.

I think one of the issues of Gnome Project is this, they use a language specifically designed for Gnome/GTK+ and as if that was not enough, it has two different syntax, one--Vala which is sort-of-kind-of C#-like and the other being Genie which is sort of kind of python-like.

cies2• 7 years ago

From the website:

There's also an option to generate C code to support more platforms and achieve [(possibly)] better performance

Another reason x-compilation to C matters: providing an escape in case the community thins out and no further updates are made on the V lang.

loup-vaillant2• 7 years ago

unless your language gets widespread adoption, you can corner your community into a bubble and drastically increase the barrier to contribution.

Only if your language (and standard library) is of comparable complexity to that of widespread languages. C has more quirks than it lets on, C++ is a monstrously complex beast, Java has an enormous standard library…

If however you keep the syntax and semantics of your language simple, they can be learned in a matter of minutes. If you keep the "standard" library focused towards your application, it won't require more effort than any other regular application.

The real problem with custom languages, I think, is that very few programmers can actually write one. Most others don't even see the need, I think in part because of motivated cognition (If I delude myself into thinking I don't need something, I don't have to face the fact that I can't do it). Though the main problem is probably education: we are taught that languages are chosen, not made. As for how they are made… well, that's the realm of geniuses who have way too much time to spare.

Every programmer should have an introduction to programming languages, and we need more specialists who can whip up a DSL in a couple days. Our craft would be very different (and I think much better) if we did that.

floatboth• 7 years ago

Genie seems super dead. Also, Vala is not that important for Gnome. Many apps are written in C, JavaScript, Python and Rust.

yesenadam2• 7 years ago

Erlang came about like that, starting from Prolog with a telecoms program and new language in mind, and developing both together. Prolog (I learnt recently) is surprisingly Lispy, e.g. data and program in the same form and easy for the program to change, everything in lists, and very FP - recursion for loops, non-mutating variables etc.

I don't how many other languages started like that. PHP for one. Probably a lot.

http://www.math.bas.bg/softeng/bantchev/place/erlang/a-histo...

http://www1.erlang.se/publications/icfp97.pdf

smt883• 7 years ago

PHP is relatively infamous for being badly designed and hard to maintain (something I did professionally for years, so I'm speaking from experience).

Erlang is still a niche.

Both are examples of confirmation bias. There is a massive graveyard of one-man languages that no one used and then died.

codetrotter3• 7 years ago

Making a programming language specifically for the needs of one program, then developing that language and the program together, is an underestimated strategy. I believe the world would be more interesting if more people applied it—because then we'd get more qualitatively different new systems.

One example of this is video game designer and programmer Jonathan Blow, best known for creating the game Braid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game)

http://braid-game.com/

He's working on a language for writing games.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-07-02-jonathan-b...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7okvam/jai_lan...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ywd77/gamelab...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/89209l/jonatha...

Here is one of many videos of him using the language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAFkdrP1CHQ

A couple of moments in that video which I would like to highlight:

At 11:15, responding to a question from chat:

Is there a specific reason the game is kind of in top-down 3D?
Because that is what helps the game mechanics that we need for this game. If it was in first-person (laughs)... it would be kind of amusing... maybe we should do that (smiles) that'd be fun.

At 14:05, responding to another question from chat:

Do I find the language scaling, well, now that I am dealing with a more complex program?
Yes. I've been dealing with a program this complicated for like five or six months so this is nothing new.

At 14:15, responding to another question from chat:

Do I have my own shader language?
No, right now we are using OpenGL and [unintelligible] GLSL.

The answer to this third question indicates to me that he is focusing on getting something that works better for him than pre-existing alternatives without getting bogged down too much that every side of his language needs to be perfect right off the bat.

In other words, he is balancing the time to perfect his language against the time he wants to spend making games rather than spending 100% of his time working on the tooling and not getting to write any games.

codetrotter3• 7 years ago

And while we're on the subject of people making their own languages to make games, see also Andy Gavin.

He made Game Oriented Object Lisp (GOOL) for himself and the other people at Naughty Dog to use when making Crash Bandicoot for the original PlayStation.

He later made another language, Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL), for the Naughty Dog game Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy for the PS2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

He has written a series of articles about the making of Crash Bandicoot on his website. Well worth a read!

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/

p0nce8• 7 years ago

You talk as if this was an example of a successful strategy of writing a general purpose language for one program.

However Jon Blow's successful games, Braid and the Witness, were not written with that new language.

SomethingOrNot6• 7 years ago

He doesn’t have a programming language. He has a series of YT videos.

Until he open sources the code (or at least lets someone else try it/look at it) discussing his “language” is giving him too much credit.

mpweiher• 7 years ago

Yes, co-development of languages with applications of language is important.

Not sure about “one”, though, Usually you want more than one example before you generalize to a library -> framework -> language.

As one of my professors used to say (a lot):

“Man kann nur von etwas abstrahieren das man verstanden hat”

You can only abstract from something you have understood. And premature abstraction is probably one of our biggest problems.

oblio• 7 years ago

I believe the world would be more interesting if more people applied it—because then we'd get more qualitatively different new systems.

Interesting, yes. More productive, not sure.

It's basically quality versus quantity, or in the words of Stalin: "quantity has a quality all its own".

So far scaling horizontally (more people working together) seems to fare far better than faring vertically (one or a few people being way more productive alone or in a small group).

nprateem• 7 years ago

What a terrible idea. I'm surprised I need to spell out that the benefit of learning a language is that you can actually use it, and the effort-reward ratio is far better if you can reuse it widely. Plus a language is far more than its syntax and compiler - its the ecosystem that makes a language productive. The last thing we need is for an explosion of half-implemented, poorly supported toy languages for individual programs.

fsloth4• 7 years ago

I disagree. A cambrian explosion of 'toy' languages is exactly what we need so that the few that become popular reach the maturity you desire.

I have this itch that there is an explicit slot in our native language infrastructure for a scripting language that is a bit less clunky than Lua, not so huge as Python, and more ClojureScript like than the other embedded lispies out there, that is trivial to embed, has a fantastic interface to C++ and is utterly pragmatic yet elegant.

A small subset of Python would probably do...

p0nce8• 7 years ago

Unless you are the competitors.

kapep• 7 years ago

I agree but at least some of the ecosystem concerns can be mitigated if you choose the right technologies to build your language. For example Eclipse Xtext lets you design languages that can easily interact with Java code and tooling, and it provides a lot tooling support like build integration in the IDE, syntax highlighting and code completions without much effort. If you keep the scope of the language small and treat it like any other module in your projects than its not hard to maintain.

p0nce8• 7 years ago

Can you quote any project were this strategy was commercially successful?

pygy_3• 7 years ago

UNIX/C, for one :-)

tomxor• 7 years ago

[...] developing that language and the program together, is an underestimated strategy. I believe the world would be more interesting if more people applied it [...]

I find this applies to most development, once you muddy the distinction between program and language you can see how the concept applies to other things - that is, it's a continuum, and artificially and prematurely locking down the design and implementation of a lower level piece before exploring the landscape can hurt... though determining what is "premature" and what is not is of course pure intuition.

giancarlostoro• 7 years ago

I think for specialized projects it makes sense and I can think off the top of my head of two: Godot and Processing. Godot is a game engine that is highly extensible, and has 1 main scripting language reminiscent of Python and another that's for lower level patching of other languages into the engine.

Processing on the other hand is more of a way for visual people to get into programming and do visual representations of data or art. A matter of fact the demo for V / Volt made me think of Processing and finding out that it can be cross platform made me wish Processing would produce native binaries like this that compile down to very small executables whilst still maintaining the same syntax (which is very Java-like, but not entirely necessary to reproduce a full on Java-like language for this purpose).

I totally agree, for certain projects it makes a lot of sense to build your own language. I wish those mainstream engines would stop embedding C# (and I love C#) and make something much more creative. There's the not-so-mainstream engines out there too that do implement their own languages like GameMaker and friends. DarkBasic also comes to mind.

sitkack2• 7 years ago

Meta-circular composition forms a powerful design technique with more than just algorithms and code. The philosophy of affordances, fault prevention, fault recovery. Self similarity helps with sourcing, alignment, jigs, etc. Many design patterns in code have analogs in other forms of engineering.

Creating a language is in an orthogonal dimension to the plane that Sapir-Whorf lives on. The realization that you can create and utilize constructed languages, not just the given languages, to solve problems. A computer programming language is a meta-tool, one uses the language to shape and reify ideas. So a computer programmer is a meta-tool user. Someone who creates computer languages is a meta-tool creator. And they are designing an idea that is congruent mathematically, mechanically (can we compute it) and mentally for a human. Maybe my version of the Turing test is, "design me a computer language to represent and solve X"

slaymaker19072• 7 years ago

I think doing away with global variables is not a very good idea. While using globals is usually a bad idea, there are many instances where globals are appropriate (at least for languages supporting mutability). People who say they never use globals usually do use globals and are just trying to convince themselves they are not because they heard they were bad from somebody.

The entire Spring framework is IMO an elaborate construction built so that engineers could use global variables without their managers finding out. There is little to no difference between carefully using global variables and Spring dependency injection except syntax.

The best solution I have ever seen to global variables is definitely parameterize with Racket (https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/parameterize.html). I don't think Racket was the first language to come up with this, but it was the first one I am aware of. The basic idea is that you define some global with a default value. However, you can call parameterize to change the value for the duration of some input function. It is made thread safe by using thread local memory. It then resets the parameter back to the default value at the end of the function.

On the other end of the spectrum, I think Rust also has a very good implementation of globals. It will let you use global variables, but you have to declare it as mutable, use some form of locking, or use an UnsafeCell. Additionally, you have to mark your code as unsafe any time you try to read or change this global variable.

omeid23• 7 years ago

There is little to no difference between carefully using global variables and Spring dependency injection except syntax.

Until you need to write unit tests.

darrenf• 7 years ago

The best solution I have ever seen to global variables is definitely parameterize with Racket (https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/parameterize.html). I don't think Racket was the first language to come up with this, but it was the first one I am aware of. The basic idea is that you define some global with a default value. However, you can call parameterize to change the value for the duration of some input function.

Isn't that basically Perl's `local`?

tripa• 7 years ago

It is, but Lisp did have it first, even if not through Racket.

chrismorgan• 7 years ago

I find myself sometimes wishing that Rust genuinely didn’t have globals. There are some things where it’d cause pain, and some places where I’m not sure what you’d replace it with (lazy_static, for example), but I find that Rust actually makes it too easy to do globals and thus have unexpected side-effects (e.g. command line arguments, environment variables, working directory—I would genuinely prefer these things to be passed to main for me to use at my discretion), although in most places the culture is against using them, which saves it from being too much of a problem. Yet still, strict functional purity can open up some delightful optimisations and avoid various bugs, just like how putting error handling into the type signatures helps clarify things and avoid all kinds of bugs. I’d like to see what Rust would be like with even fewer, or no, globals.

omaranto2• 7 years ago

I don't think Racket was the first language to come up with this.

Racket's parameters are just dynamically scoped variables. Most Lisps have them. The older Lisps actually predate lexically scoped variables and had dynamically scoped variables exclusively! Emacs Lisp is not even that old and only had dynamic scope until relatively recently.

soegaard• 7 years ago

Racket's parameters are just dynamically scoped variables. More or less. Racket's parameters also work with multiple threads and cooperates with continuations.

In Scheme it is common to see `fluid-let` to handle classic dynamically scoped variables.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

V consts are a bit more powerful. For example you can define structs:

const red = gx.Color{255, 0, 0}

or even call simple functions that only return values

const red = gx.rgb(255, 0, 0)

n13• 7 years ago

As a someone who has never design the language or implemented a compiler, this seems to be on very very daunting task. Just wondering how much effort it requires and if someone like me - who has experience in developing software using high-level languages but not compilers - can implement it. It seems to be very interesting project and I would love to try something like this just for the sake of learning. I would really appreciate if someone can give me the pointers about where to begin with.

mathgladiator2• 7 years ago

It is daunting, but getting started is actually straight forward. For instance, you could start by simply writing a domain language that translates your grammar via a tool like ANTLR or simply raw abstract syntax trees to C++.

It gets hard the more features you add to have a consistent experience and all the other tooling a language has (like debugging).

I find these problems fun and help in making you a better programmer, but the cost to be successful is immense.

omegabravo• 7 years ago

http://craftinginterpreters.com/

It's an excellent book and is incredibly approachable.

slimsag• 7 years ago

How does this prevent data races? Does it suffer performance, or require Rust-like annotations about lifetimes?

wishinghand• 7 years ago

Off topic, but will there be a dark mode for Volt? I can’t abide by Slack’s lack of official one and the constant overwriting of the file that maintains the hack for the unofficial one.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Yes, there will be.

aethertron• 7 years ago

Very very interesting. But I hope it's renamed to something other than a single-letter name, so we can use search engines to find info about the language later.

karolusrex• 7 years ago

Usually you can find information about a new language pretty easily by adding "Lang", e.g. "go lang" etc

lucas_membrane2• 7 years ago

Looks like this language has something in common with single-assignment C. Can anyone offer comparison/ontrast with that?

stabbles• 7 years ago

I tried the app on the mac and it's very buggy.

I couldn't save settings, and from then it kept on crashing after restarting the app.

gbersac• 7 years ago

I was considering downloading it, but I think I won't now that I read your answer. Do you know of any good competitor ?

anderskaseorg• 7 years ago

“No variable shadowing” might sound great when you’re thinking about that one time someone confused you for three seconds with the addition of a new inner variable with the same name as an outer variable. But once you realize that it equally means forbidding the addition of a new outer variable with the same name as an inner variable (even though those inner variables are supposed to be implementation details)—and, as a corollary, you can never add new builtins to the language without breaking backwards compatibility—you’ll realize that most languages allow shadowing for a reason.

vanderZwan3• 7 years ago

you can never add new builtins to the language without breaking backwards compatibility

Adding any keyword is by definition breaking backwards compatibility, so I'd say this is the correct behavior.

kupiakos4• 7 years ago

I think you're confusing "keyword" with "reserved word". A keyword has a special meaning in certain circumstances, while a reserved word cannot be used as an identifier. In some languages, those are the same thing.

For example, "goto" is a reserved word in Java, while not a keyword. Inversely, in Fortran, keywords are not reserved names, so `if if then then else else` is valid. C# has "keywords" and "contextual keywords", both categories being keywords, but only the former being reserved names.

Regardless, a builtin might be referring to a function that's included as part of the base language - like make() in Golang or zip() in Python.

elcomet2• 7 years ago

Let's say python is adding a new builtin function, like "filter".

I already have a "filter" function defined in my program, so it will shadow the builtin function, and my program will still work as intended.

hexmiles• 7 years ago

For me personaly the killer fature is: C/C++ to V translator

Having all my library in the same language make a lot thing like debugging and testing easier. It also semplify the mental model i have of the program.

Also C(lang) interop is my main struggle with go. For me it is such a pain that something i wrap a c library in a stdout/stdin server and just spawn it and use cap'n'proto for communication. When you use cgo you lose the easy cross-compiling, i would love for something similar in go and/or rust.

I wonder if llvm could be used to implement a sort of universal transpiler. even if it not use the target language in a semantic language it still make a lot of thing easier.

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

For me personaly the killer fature is: C/C++ to V translator

Yes, I'm super excited about it!

coldtea8• 7 years ago

Is this a real language, or am I dreaming this?

Those are exactly the ideas I had for what would make a perfect language! (Assuming they're implemented properly of course).

Simple features. Immutable and pure by default (but not dogmatically so). Fast compile. Hot reload. Automatic C interop. Fast-ish. Built in niceties like hashmaps, strings, and vectors (niceties compared to bare C). Receivers so you don't have to do the song and dance you do in C to tie structs and functions. No header files!

Go came close, but no cigar. Rust added the whole kitchen sink and loads of accidental complexity. Anxious to see how this fares...

steveklabnik• 7 years ago

Have you seen Zig?

coldtea8• 7 years ago

Yes, Zig is another one I'm excited about.

zevv• 7 years ago

You might want to take a peek at the Nim language as well; it has all of the above and is quite mature.

dual_basis• 7 years ago

Hit reload though?

fooker2• 7 years ago

How does the live reloading work when you are compiling to C or machine code and claim to not have a runtime?

dna_polymerase3• 7 years ago

Fantastic stuff. Waiting for a release though before getting too excited. Sounds too much for a single person to do.

p0nce8• 7 years ago

Full source code is available here.

Link refers to the same page.

amelius• 7 years ago

Modern garbage collectors are very powerful and optimized. However for the best performance and latency it's better to use a language without a GC.

This is quite a controversial statement. But it could indeed be true, see this article: [1]

[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2037...

slaymaker19072• 7 years ago

I would be cautious about making a language with only reference counting since you can easily end up with stack overflows when implementing something as innocent as a linked list unless you keep some sort of list of objects to free in the runtime.

warpech• 7 years ago

Apparently now there are two programming languages called "V", the other being: https://www.vcode.org/

rafaelvasco7• 7 years ago

Yeah, i guess V is just a temporary name. Other nice names : Jolt, Quark, Ether, L, Lum etc;

solarkraft2• 7 years ago

You can also simply translate your entire C/C++ codebase to V and make your build times up to 400 times faster.

What are traditional compiler makers missing?

hawski• 7 years ago

Would it be possible to compile V to Java or JVM byte code, but by not using giant array in the middle? I'm mainly wondering if one could use GTK+ in Linux and Android APIs without JNI on Android.

mjaniczek• 7 years ago

Re the website: are the fonts quite unreadable just for me? https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/761f208...

(BTW, the language itself is exciting!)

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

Yea, it's using Google fonts, I'd better switch to something more standard.

leshow2• 7 years ago

Originally Volt app was written in Go, but after a couple of weeks of development I decided to re-write it in C for two reasons: easier integration with existing C graphics and UI libraries and much smaller binaries. The app size reduced from ~5 MB to ~100 KB.

I'm always curious when people complain about binary sizes. Was there some reason the binary needed to be small? Or just based on some sense of 'largeness' and 'smallness'. It seems to me like rewriting in a 'less productive language' to save a few mbs of binary size that nobody cared about anyway is a pretty big waste of time.

I don't mean to come across super critical, there are cases where binary size could be really important. Say you're on an embedded platform with minimal memory. I just don't /understand why it was something worth optimising over here... especially to the point of a rewrite

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

It was not just about the size. I experienced major issues with cgo.

GenericsMotors• 7 years ago

This is the same attitude that has gotten us 20MB+ web page sizes.

leshow2• 7 years ago

I'm not talking about a web page, I'm talking about a binary you're running locally. Your criticism doesn't apply.

gnuvince• 7 years ago

I'm interested to know how the language handles memory; automatic memory reclamation without a GC and that is simpler than Rust seems like a very attractive proposition.

akrymski2• 7 years ago

Finally, a simple alternative to C++! I've been dreaming about creating this for years, thank you for doing it!

Few ideas I had:

- Simple classes (no inheritance, only mixins) like in JavaScript

- Always pass objects by reference as in Java to avoid the pointer mess

- Copy the core APIs from ECMAScript

Kip9000• 7 years ago

I'm excited about this.. Feature list seems almost too good to be true. :)

Rusky• 7 years ago

You can also simply translate your entire C/C++ codebase to V and make your build times up to 400 times faster. An automatic translator supports the latest standards of these languages.

Is this saying you can actually get compile time improvements compared to the original codebase? If so I can imagine a couple of ways this could work-

1) skipping the optimization the C/C++ compilers would do, with V's direct-to-machine-code generator, and/or

2) doing some heavy lifting in the translator, so the equivalent V has more redundancy and less implicit information.

How close am I? Or is there something else here?

mbrodersen• 7 years ago

The programming language C was invented to write Unix. So sometimes creating a language to write software works. The defence industry (in the US) is (apparently) notorious for doing this. Any other examples?

BlackEspresso• 7 years ago

Looks really good. Any ressources on how you wrote the x86_64 backend ? Or Thema Compiler per se?

amedvednikov41• 7 years ago

http://ref.x86asm.net/coder64.html mostly

shouyatf• 7 years ago

You can also simply translate your entire C/C++ codebase to V and make your build times up to 400 times faster. An automatic translator supports the latest standards of these languages.

How do you plan to translate the latest C++ standard with all those template stuff?

About V, the language Volt is written in

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