The V Programming Language 0.4 beta

Simple, fast, safe, compiled. For developing maintainable software.

github.com/vlang/v 36k

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fn main() {
    areas := ['game', 'web', 'tools', 'science', 'systems',
              'embedded', 'drivers', 'GUI', 'mobile']
    for area in areas {
        println('Hello, ${area} developers!')
    }
}

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As of today, programs built with the V compiler no longer leak memory by default.
May 29, 2022
7000 pull requests have been merged!

What developers say about V

The V development team does an amazing job. I've never seen a language evolve that fast; I suspect you guys never sleep. I hope V will remain a simple, clean language and have a bright future. Thanks for all your hard work.
I'm mostly surprised by how many things "just work". Channels and closures made implementing asynchronous callbacks for C functions such a breeze. Thanks for that! šŸ˜„
Been programming for around 30 years. Have done some C/C++, VB, and lots of Delphi years ago. Then PHP/Ruby for over 15 years. Bash, Python too. Recently I've wanted to start using a compiled language for reasons, and have looked at Rust, Go, and a couple others. I stumbled upon V a few weeks ago and have been very surprised by how easy it is to pick up. I am really enjoying writing V and feel like I am already productive. Even to the point I'm now looking at making a small ...
Really like the direction of V, been wondering when this kind of language would pop up.
V is amazing. Things I like about it:
  • Flexibility for operator overloading. (it makes syntax intuitive)
  • Compiles directly to C, and I love C
  • Flexibility for having and not having garbage collection
  • Go concurrency model
  • I come from a strong Java and Go background and have been playing with Rust. V looks pretty amazing in terms of readability.
    V is amazingly simple!
    Gotta say that V's syntax is amazing (especially the error handling aspect for me since I strongly dislike Go's error handling approach but liked its other aspects).
    After V, developing a kernel in C results in more bugs, honestly more so because V catches a set of bugs and memory leakage that C simply doesn't.

    mint, maintainer of Vinix
    Just want to say thank you for continuing to improve the language. Adding the GC was very nice and I find V my all-time favorite language. Using V is fun due to great syntax and tooling but also makes you a better developer as you try to understand how things work underneath.
    Just wanted to say thank you to everyone contributing to V! Before September 2023 I never really coded nor completed any project as the tools I had were less than ideal. In September I started learning V and now I have a really good prototype and a professional developer even reached out to me saying my code was really good! That's why I wanted to thank V and all the contributors šŸ„°
    It's obvious that Alex was able to bring his experience of many other languages to V, giving the language a very solid foundation. It's difficult for me to list all the positive qualities I like about V because I'm sure I'll forget some. I'll try it anyway.
  • compilation speed
  • simplicity (only a few keywords), yet powerful
  • readability & maintainability
  • execution performance
  • cross compilation ...
  • Thanks to everyone who contributed to this project. The simplicity of language and the fact that it's compiled makes it number 1 where applicable.
    I think you do not get enough credit for the amazing language V is. Thank you for your time and effort.
    When I stumbled across V, it just 'felt right'.
    Thank you very much to everyone contributing to V! It's been 1.5 years since I've discovered it. I really enjoy the kind and helping community, the simplicity philosophy and lots of other things. I was pleasantly surprised by the easiness of creating an HTTP server: just a few lines and then handling the request is very easy by following the example. A big thank you from the bottom of my heart ā¤ļø
    V is the better Go. I use V in production for my personal projects. It is such a joy to use.
    When I stumbled across V, it just 'felt right'.
    I mastered Python when I worked as a Data Scientist a few years ago. Since I discovered V I stopped using Python almost entirely, and now I look back and... it's awful. Never had so much fun programming as I am now.
    Over the past year or so, V has become much more stable. I love what this community does. I greatly appreciate the developers for keeping bugs to a minimum, staying on top of optimizations, helping newcomers, and always being available for discussions and brainstorming. Iā€™m grateful to be part of this community and very thankful.

    Simple language for building maintainable programs

    You can learn the entire language by going through the documentation over a weekend, and in most cases there's only one way to do something.

    This results in simple, readable, and maintainable code.

    Despite being simple, V gives a lot of power to the developer and can be used in pretty much every field, including systems programming, webdev, gamedev, GUI, mobile, science, embedded, tooling, etc.

    V is very similar to Go. If you know Go, you already know ā‰ˆ80% of V. Things V improves on Go: vlang.io/compare#go.

    Safety

    Performance

    • C interop without any costs
    • Minimal amount of allocations
    • Built-in serialization without runtime reflection
    • Compiles to native binaries without any dependencies: a simple web server is only about 250 KB
    • As fast as C (V's main backend compiles to human readable C), with equivalent code.
      V does introduce some overhead for safety (such as array bounds checking, GC free), but these features can be disabled/bypassed when performance is more important.

    Fast compilation

    V compiles ā‰ˆ80k (Clang backend) and ā‰ˆ400k (x64 and tcc backends) lines of code per second.
    (Apple M2, no optimization)

    V is written in V and compiles itself in under a second (0.33s on MacBook Air M3).

    Most of the compiler is still single threaded, so it's going to be 2-3x faster in the future!

    Small and easy to build compiler

    V can be bootstrapped in under a second by compiling its code translated to C with a simple

    cc v.c
    No libraries or dependencies needed.

    For comparison, space and time required to build each compiler:

    Space  Build time
    Go525 MB1m 33s
    Rust30 GB45m
    GCC8 GB50m
    Clang90 GB [0] 60m
    Swift70 GB [1] 90m
    V< 20 MB [2] <1s

    Building V in 0.3 seconds and then using the resulting binary to build itself again:

    Try it yourself:

    wget https://github.com/vlang/v/releases/latest/download/v_linux.zip
    unzip v_linux && cd v
    time ./v self

    Flexible memory management

    V avoids doing unnecessary allocations in the first place by using value types, string buffers, promoting a simple abstraction-free code style.

    There are 4 ways to manage memory in V.

    The default is a minimal and a well performing tracing GC.

    The second way is autofree, it can be enabled with -autofree. It takes care of most objects (~90-100%): the compiler inserts necessary free calls automatically during compilation. Remaining small percentage of objects is freed via GC. The developer doesn't need to change anything in their code. "It just works", like in Python, Go, or Java, except there's no heavy GC tracing everything or expensive RC for each object. Autofree is still experimental and not production ready yet. That's planned for V 1.0.

    For developers willing to have more low level control, memory can be managed manually with -gc none.

    Arena allocation is available via v -prealloc.

    V's autofree demo. All objects are freed during compilation. Running the Ved editor on an 8 MB file with 0 leaks:

    C translation

    V can translate your entire C project and offer you the safety, simplicity, and compilation speed-up (via modules).

    v translate file.c
    
    std::vector s;
    s.push_back("V is ");
    s.push_back("awesome");
    std::cout << s.size();
    mut s := []
    s << 'V is '
    s << 'awesome'
    println(s.len)

    A blog post/tutorial about translating DOOM is available.

    C++ to V translation is at an early stage.

    Translating DOOM from C to V and building it in under a second:

    You can read translated code here: github.com/vlang/doom

    Hot code reloading

    Get your changes instantly without recompiling.

    Since you also don't have to get to the state you are working on after every compilation, this can save a lot of precious minutes of your development time.

    github.com/.../examples/hot_reload

    A powerful graphics library

    Cross-platform drawing library gg, using OpenGL/Metal/DirectX 11 for rendering 2D applications.

    There's also a 3D engine in development with the following features already available:

    • Loading complex 3D objects with textures
    • Camera (moving, looking around)
    • Skeletal animation

    A simple example of the graphics library in action is tetris.v.

    For 3D examples, check out this.

    Light and fast cross-platform GUI library

    Build native UI apps with V UI. You no longer need to embed a browser to develop cross-platform apps quickly.

    V has a UI module that uses custom drawing, similar to Qt and Flutter, but with as much similarity to the native GUI toolkit as possible.

    It has a declarative API similar to SwiftUI and React Native and runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android.

    Coming soon:

    • a Delphi-like visual editor for building native GUI apps
    • iOS support

    github.com/vlang/ui

    Volt, a 3 MB Slack/Discord client built with V and V UI:

    Easy cross compilation

    To cross compile your software simply run v -os windows or v -os linux. No extra steps required, even for GUI and graphical apps!

    (Compiling macOS software only works on macOS for now.)

    Building V for Windows using V for macOS, and then testing resulting v.exe on a Windows VM:

    Painless deployments and dependency management

    To build your project, no matter how big, all you need to do is run

    v .
    

    No build environments, makefiles, headers, virtual environments, etc.
    You get a single statically linked binary that is guaranteed to work on all operating systems (provided you cross compile) without any dependencies.

    Installing new libraries via vpm, a centralized package manager written in V, is as simple as
    v install ui
    		

    Run everywhere

    V can emit (human readable) C, so you get the great platform support and optimization of GCC and Clang. (Use v -prod . to make optimized builds.)

    Emitting C will always be an option, even after direct machine code generation matures.

    V can call C code, and calling V code is possible in any language that has C interop.

    REPL

    v
    >>> import net.http
    >>> data := http.get('https://vlang.io/utc_now')!
    >>> data.body
    1565977541

    Cross-platform shell scripts in V

    V can be used as an alternative to Bash to write deployment scripts, build scripts, etc. The advantage of using V for this is the simplicity and predictability of the language, and cross-platform support. "V scripts" run on Unix-like systems as well as on Windows.

    for file in ls('build/') {
      rm(file)
    }
    mv('v.exe', 'build/')
    
    v run deploy.vsh

    Read more about V script

    Code formatting with vfmt for consistent style

    No more arguments about coding styles. There's one official coding style enforced by the vfmt formatter.

    All V code bases are guaranteed to use the same style, making it easier to read and change code written by other developers.

    v fmt -w hello.v

    A built-in code profiler

    Build and run your program with

    v -profile profile.txt x.v && ./x
    and you'll get a detailed list for all function calls: number of calls, average time per call, total time per call.

    JavaScript and WASM backends

    V programs can be translated to JavaScript (WIP):

    v -o hello.js hello.v

    The JS backend is at an early stage.

    They can also be compiled to WASM (for now with Emscripten, but native WASM support is planned). V compiler compiled to WASM and running V programs by translating them to JavaScript:

    v-wasm.vercel.app

    A game written using V's graphical backend and compiled to WASM:

    v2048

    Automatic documentation

    Use vdoc to get instant documentation generated directly from the module's source code. No need to keep and update separate documentation.

    v doc os

    Built-in testing framework

    Writing tests is very easy: just start your test function with test_

    fn get_string() string { return 'hello' }
    
    fn test_get_string() {
      assert get_string() == 'hello'
    }
          

    Friendly error messages

    Helpful error messages make learning the language and fixing errors simpler:

    user.v:8:14: error: `update_user` parameter `user` is mutable, you need to provide `mut`: `update_user(mut user)`
    
        7 |     mut user := User{}
        8 |     update_user(user)
          |                 ~~~~
        9 | }
    	

    Powerful built-in web framework Veb

    Veb is very fast (built on top of pico.v which has been at the top of TechEmpower benchmark), it compiles into a single binary (html templates are also compiled), supports hot code reloading (the website is automatically updated in the browser once you change any .v/.html file).

    github.com/vlang/v/tree/master/vlib/veb

    ['/post/:id'] fn (b &Blog) show_post(id int) veb.Result { post := b.posts_repo.retrieve(id) or { return veb.not_found() } return veb.view(post) }

    Gitly, a light and fast alternative to GitHub/GitLab is built in V and Veb.

    Built-in ORM

    import db.sqlite struct Customer { id int name string nr_orders int country string } fn main() { db := sqlite.connect('example.sqlite') or { panic('could not create/find example.sqlite') } nr_customers := sql db { select count from Customer }! println('number of customers: ${nr_customers}') // V syntax can be used to build queries uk_customers := sql db { select from Customer where country == 'uk' && nr_orders > 0 }! for customer in uk_customers { println('${customer.id} - ${customer.name}') } // by adding `limit 1` we tell V that there will be // only one object customer := sql db { select from Customer where id == 1 limit 1 }! println(customer.name) // insert a new customer new_customer := Customer{name: 'Bob', nr_orders: 10} sql db { insert new_customer into Customer }! }

    Built in V

    The V Compiler

    V itself is written in V.

    Volt

    Native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Matrix, Telegram, Twitch and many more services.

    Vinix

    A minimalistic open-source OS that can already run Bash, GCC, and V.

    Ved

    Open-source 1 MB editor with the performance of Sublime Text.

    Vox Browser

    An early stage HTML+CSS renderer which can already render sites like Hacker News 20x faster than Chrome while using 4x less RAM.

    Volt.im instant messaging and social platform

    An upcoming open source alternative to Discord and Telegram that combines the best features of the two while being ultra fast and light.

    vsql

    A single-file SQL database written in pure V with no dependencies.

    coreutils in V

    Programs equivalent to GNU coreutils, written 100% in V.

    C to V translator

    This tool can already translate entire original DOOM. C++ support is planned as well. It does full automatic conversion to human readable code.

    V UI

    Cross-platform widget toolkit.

    Gitly

    Open-source light and fast alternative to GitHub/GitLab.

    Vorum

    Right now it's very basic forum/blogging software, but in the future it will be a full featured light alternative to Discourse.
    The V forum runs on Vorum.

    vgram

    A bot library for Telegram Bot API.

    Awesome V

    A curated list of awesome V frameworks, libraries and software

    The V Tensor Library

    An n-dimensional Tensor data structure, sophisticated reduction, elementwise, and accumulation operations, data Structures that can easily be passed to C libraries, powerful linear algebra routines backed by VSL.

    The V Scientific Library

    A Scientific Library with a great variety of different modules.

    Are you using V to build your product or library? Have it added to this list.

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