site/content/posts/vlang/index.md

---
title: "My Experience With V"
date: 2022-06-26
draft: true
---

For the last half a year or so, I've written code nearly exclusively in the V
programming language (excluding college projects). In this time, I've learned a
lot about the language, as well as being an active member of the community.

I don't recall exactly how I discovered V. being the kind of nerd that has a
list of languages they wanna try, I probably saw it somewhere & added it.
Luckily, V was the one I wanted to try out the most. After visiting
[vlang.io](https://vlang.io/), I joined the Discord server & that's where the
fun began!

Before I talk about the language itself, I would like to take a moment to
appreciate the community. I felt welcome the moment I joined, and everyone
(especially the V developers) was very helpful with any questions I had. If it
wasn't for their help, [Vieter](https://git.rustybever.be/vieter-v/vieter)
probably wouldn't be as far along as it is today!

## What's V?

While I'm not interested in giving a full description of the language, a short
introduction is in order. V is a compiled programming language with a syntax
very similar to Go. The main compiler backend transpiles V to C, providing
interopt with C code without any effort. This also gives the compilation phase
access to all optimisations that C compilers have to offer, resulting in very
fast & optimized binaries. I'd list more things, but then it wouldn't be short
anymore!

## Developing in V

Now for the relevant part of this post, the actual developing!

Developing locally in V is pretty straightforward. Write some code, run `v .`,
blink, see if you made a mistake, repeat. For me, this is a very important
feature of V. Not only does the compiler handle the "build system" for you;
it's also incredibly fast. This is accomplished by using the tcc compiler, a
small & extremely fast C compiler, for development builds. Thanks to this,
compiling my code doesn't take me out of "the flow"; a problem that I've faced
when working with Rust code, as I'm very sensitive to losing focus.

Building optimized binaries is equally simple; just run `v -prod .`. This will
use either gcc or clang to compile your code using the max optimisation levels.

Due to the rapidly developing nature of V, it is possible that old code no
longer compiles on a newer compiler. This won't happen once the language is
stabilized, but as of today, changes can occur. I don't actually know how
others handle this, but I personally maintain a mirror of the compiler that I
update regularly. This way, I decide when code might break, meaning I can react
quickly to make sure nothing stays broken for long. This brings me to my CI
setup!

Because overengineering is fun, I have my own CI server that I use to test &
deploy basically everything I create; V software is no exception! Using Docker
buildx, I create multi-architecture Alpine-based images containing my compiler
fork & any C library dependencies that I use. These images are then used in my
CI to build statically compiled binaries that I can use to create the actual
Docker images! Due to V compiling to C, compiling static binaries is quite
simple; just build using a musl-based OS such as Alpine Linux.

Enough drooling over my CI, back to V! Yes, when I was writing code in V, I
encountered some bugs in the compiler. While a bit inconvenient at times, they
definitely weren't a showstopper for me. V is still a developing language; I'm
not gonna try to advertise that it isn't. The thing is though, I was able to
report these compiler bugs to the community immediately, many of which being
fixed within 24 hours by one of the V developers! V might still be in
development, but it's definitely already ready for developing projects. My
[vieter](https://git.rustybever.be/vieter-v/vieter) project has nearly 4k SLoC
and still compiles just as quickly as when I started it. The resulting binaries
are rock-solid; my personal Vieter instance has been running for months without
issues.

## Conclusion?

It's clear from this post that I've taken a liking to V. The amount of
evolution I've seen in the months that I've been using it is impressive, and
I'm certain that V will reach its goal of being a stable language. I'm fine
tagging along until that day comes :)

In the context of developing Vieter, I've written a multitude of software
pieces, ranging from a cron daemon to a rewrite of Arch Linux's `repo-add`
command. This variety gives me confidence that V can already be used to develop
varied & complex software.

Besides developing Vieter, I'd like to enrich the ecosystem with packages that
I think will be useful for everyone. To this end, I've started splitting off
modules of the Vieter codebase & developing them independently. My first goal
will be writing a Docker client
[library](https://git.rustybever.be/vieter-v/docker), as I find this to be very
useful for any language to have (and also I need it myself of course).

Now, I know using these new and/or developing languages is not for everyone.
Some just prefer sticking to the proven titans of the industry, and that's
fine. However, for those like me that love using these new langs, I really do
recommend checking out V. It's fast, it's of course free and open-source, and
using a language is one of the best ways of helping it move forward. Perhaps
when you join, you'll see a Chewing Bever babbling on ;)