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| title | date | draft |
|---|---|---|
| My Experience With V | 2022-06-26 | 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, 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 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 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, 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 ;)