That particular word was used back when V was not yet really open-sourced and only the playground and prebuilt binary was available [1]. The author falsely stated (among others) that it was already open-sourced, and while I believe it was a simple misunderstanding the reaction was not really far-fetched back then. That specific claim was retracted once the compiler was properly open-sourced [2].
V was never a "scam" or "vaporware", that's a false characterization and misuse of the terms. Such is being done for the purpose of attempting to hurt the public image of competition, for the benefit of certain parties.
V has been open-sourced, on GitHub, and downloadable since June 22nd of 2019. The language creator publicly stated he would put it out in late June, and did.
There was some excessive fuss about, around June of 2019, over a Patreon supporter early release. That was his right to do such a release, and it was specific for those supporters, but detractors were "angry" that it wasn't for them or open-sourced.
What some detractors were trying to do, was claim that V would never be released because it was somehow a "scam" or "vaporware". That is, there was nothing to release. They were of course wrong, because V was publicly released. That's when targets were switched or the goal posts moved. Anything that could be used to attempt to justify the earlier vitriol, inhibit the rising popularity, or hurt the public image of the language was used.
Furthermore, no programming language is released as a finished product. And an alpha version of any language, is understood by most, as work in progress (WIP) by default. There is no "scam" there. For open-source projects, any person is free to contribute, if they are really so technically knowledgeable as they claim or give the appearance of being. Everyone is free to donate or sponsor a project that they like, there's nothing nefarious about that.
My exact statement is that: people had good reasons to believe V is a scam or vaporware before 2019-06-22. Note that this is completely distinct from the statement that V was a scam or vaporware in the same period [1]. I believe this is true. If you don't think so, I'd like to hear your rationales for that---not the reason that V is not a scam or vaporware.
[1] I should point out that vaporware can be a temporary status, that is, something can become a vaporware until it no longer is. So the exact pinpointing is necessary.
It was never known to everybody else that the source code would be available 2 days later. I still remember my surprise [1] back then. I, among others to which you still seem to have bad feelings, now believe that you were indeed not malicious and just bad at public relations like many of us. But that is the hindsight and no one would know it at that time.
It was a combination between Patreon and Github Sponsors for solo the lead developer at the time making several thousand USD per month. Those campaigns are still ongoing AFAIK, but the contribution amounts are now private.
This right here is why people have a problem with you and your language. You did make outrageous claims, and to now say you didn't is gaslighting. Accordingly, people do not trust you.
Here's just one. On an early version of your webpage you said in big bold font:
> V can translate your entire C/C++ project and offer you the safety, simplicity, and up to 200x compilation speed up.
When people called you out, it turned into this small subscript:
> C++ to V translation is at an early stage.
And it's been in an "early stage" ever since.
I'm sorry, but when you said "can translate your entire C/C++ project" did you mean "can" or did you mean "one day will be able to". Because those are completely different, and to say one when you mean the other is grossly misleading. To now say that you never said the former outrageous claim is gaslighting. We're not idiots or goldfish.
I responded to the post where he said "There were no outrageous claims".
"V can translate your entire C/C++ project" is an outrageous claim because it wasn't true then, it isn't true now, and it doesn't appear it will ever be true.
it is typical for experimental/beta/alpha projects that features don't work or/and later found not to be feasible and later dropped from road map, there is nothing "outrageous" here.
From another hand, you clearly tried to manipulate narrative by changing context and specificity.
everything in early stage not prod-ready experimental project is on roadmap, there is no guarantee anything works or will work, this is only healthy expectations for such projects.
Now, can you tell why you and similar folks follow val author in every post even issue has been resolved long ago?
>everything in early stage not prod-ready experimental project is on roadmap
There's an archive link posted in this thread that shows the specific feature mentioned (transpilation) was on main site front page and presented as ready and working.
>can you tell why you
Not sure why this became personal. My comments are public and can easily check this isn't the case.
> There's an archive link posted in this thread that shows the specific feature mentioned (transpilation) was on main site front page and presented as ready and working.
my reading of archive is that this was in active work, he had examples of translation, and some now dead link on leveldb translation, and some c++ to val translation implementation but removed it lately: https://web.archive.org/web/20190226163127/https://vlang.io/...
> Not sure why this became personal. My comments are public and can easily check this isn't the case.
You just made a "scam" claim about issue which has been resolved long ago. So, this is the case, and I am wondering what is your motivation.
Developers are allowed to get or ask for contributions, donations, or sponsors.
To add to the strangeness of how its being mischaracterized, was the apparent jealousy (back in 2019) over the amount of donations that other developers got. Then for certain ones to have got so upset at getting less, they started to bash and publicly ask people to give them their money instead.
Somehow, it's OK for X to get money for their competing language, but it's "wrong" for Y to get money for their language.
All open-source programming languages are allowed to get or ask for donations and have sponsors, not just the languages that one is a fan of.
It's also ethically wrong to engage in falsely labeling or making false accusations, such as "scam" or "vaporware". Particularly, when the actual intent or agenda is that such persons are detractors or competitors from rival languages.
Lastly, various financial supporters of the V language have even come on HN to tell and explain how proud they are of the language and the progress it has made. Despite detractors and competitors, V is still making fantastic progress, and that's great to see.
> All open-source programming languages are allowed to get or ask for donations and have sponsors, [...]
> Particularly, when the actual intent or agenda is that such persons are detractors or competitors from rival languages.
V was not open-sourced when the accusation was made, and there were probably two or three people qualifying your description of "rivals" (even after assuming bad intents). Stop diluting the context.
> Lastly, various financial supporters of the V language have even come on HN to tell and explain how proud they are of the language and the progress it has made.
This is not different from how many investors to failed crowdfunding campaigns would behave before the actual failure. They will either acknolwedge risks (but few actually evaluate them) or "answer" every criticism with non sequiturs. It is not really their fault, but still useless as an evidence.
The "early access" thing makes sense in closed-source projects but not much in F/OSS projects. Now I understand what you meant, but as I've said it was not technically open-sourced for two days and no one would be sure whether you are sincere or not.
This confusion should have been temporary and could have been easily resolved, but your reaction arguably made things worse. For example back then I actually asked you about the exact generic compilation strategy [1], and your answer was unnecessarily aggressive and content-free. It turns out that my later guess (to which you never replied) was right, i.e. the initial V compiler maintained a partial C code template that can be patched. If you had actually answered as such, people would have less reasons to disbelieve you because you have demonstrated a necessary understanding. This was also why other language developers were particularly harsh to you at the beginning.
> You have previously claimed that the V compiler uses no AST. However, most of the features that you claim would require a form of AST to even work, including generics and interfaces. [...] It's pretty much impossible to not have unless you have a very basic language or doing naïve transformations into another similar language.
You have misinterpreted this as follows:
> Claims like it's not possible to build features without AST or codegen json decoders are just ridiculous.
GingerBill pointed out that you have misread his comments and restated that:
> [...] if you language does not have an AST, which is technically possible, then you cannot have a lot of the features you have been advertising.
This is not saying "impossible". He is claiming that it is possible, but some features will be lacking. I considered this is inaccurate because he was unclear about which features will be affected, so I quantified the original claim as follows and asked you for the confirmation:
> For example, you can implement generics without an AST if you don't care about performance; [...] [T]hose features can be implemented without an AST, but an AST is a standard and reasonable way to do them and not using an AST would require a strong rationale. So what's that rationale? (And amedvednikov, this is my question for you.)
Now, I knew the discussion can often go awry even without bad intents and tried to make it constructive as much as I could. There were many reasonable answers, like "yeah, that's how I did and that makes compilation much faster" or "none of both, the compiler doesn't directly emit binaries". The latter would trigger other questions and at the end everyone could have a much better understanding of what the V compiler actually does.
Instead you replied:
> No you don't understand :) It's IMPOSSIBLE without AST. The Odin creator says so. That's why I'm a liar.
I still don't know why you said that. I even explicitly said that gingerBill has another misconception! You've said that you have no bad feelings to me, and I wish it's true, but this is a typical way to convey that you are angry at me (and gingerBill). "Aggression" generally refers to any action or response that makes someone else unpleasant, and your comment was clearly aggressive to me.
On the other hand, I can see why you have bad feeling about gingerBill. That's another reason I wanted to step in because confirmation bias is pervasive and continuous counterarguments are needed to avoid that---gingerBill initially didn't question your intents. I wanted to make you distracted and not vent your apparent anger by throwing another question, but it didn't work.
For that reason I chose to entirely ignore that paragraph in my reply and asked for the confirmation again, but you never replied back. Others may consider this as another evidence that you were indeed angry at me. I don't, to be explicit, but such an unnecessarily aggressive discourse is often colloquially called a drama.
----
I still can't believe I have to explicitly write this comment, but after multiple interactions I feel it's necessary and hope it helps. It is very hard to effectively communicate only with texts, and I had been there years ago. I only sort-of-learned this after decades of shitposting and fruitless debates. I believe one can learn this without all my hassles.
Maybe "scam" is a harsh claim, but "outrageous and frequently false claims made by devs lacking solid credentials to match them".
And there were several comments and articles debunking these claims.