User:Tiraboschi/Drafting/V (programming language)

V, also known as Vlang, is a statically typed, compiled programming language, designed and maintained by Russian programmer Alex Medvednikov. V is very similar to Go, ghosting its syntax and concurrency system, but implements a memory management scheme and other safety features from Rust. The official release of the V compiler was originally written in Go, but is now self-hosting and can further transpile to Javascript and C. V was written to specifically focus on being easy to learn, fast, and safe. A consistent claim of the language is its ability to compile up to 1.2 million lines of code per second, with the resulting binary performing within 3% of an equivalent C program, and that it can compile its own compiler in under half a second.

History
The V programming language was first documented in March 2019, after a period of being listed as a new language used specifically to create Volt, a social networking app created by V designer Alex Medvednikov. It was created with the intent of having a very small memory footprint, small binary sizes, fast compilation, and of being safe, with features such as checking for type-errors at compile time, lacking null pointers, and defaulting to immutable objects. At launch, V only supported Linux and macOS.

As of 17 November, V is considered to be in alpha, as many of its claims are still a work in progress. According to V's official website and GitHub repository, the first stable release, version 0.2, is due late November 2019, and release 1.0 is due December 2019.

Criticism
V has received multiple of criticisms across sources, generally questioning its claims to performance, safety, and lack of dependencies. It has, especially prior to the source code's release, been considered vaporware.

On 22 June, Medvednikov stated in the release announcement for V's source code release that there are "lots of hacks I'm really embarrassed about" and that it contains "a lot of ugly C code", but that it will be "quickly cleaned up in the coming weeks".