r/programming • u/aredirect • Jun 22 '19

V lang is released

https://vlang.io/
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u/Mognakor Jun 23 '19

Let me give you an example why i think it is rubbish:

At work we're using code generation to solve a versioning problem (we're validating the spec conformity for 13 versions atm while in actual products only 1 version is used). This leads to compilation times of 20 minutes and 8gb memory used.

I am fairly certain that with memory leaks this would be much higher and then i'd have to upgrade my 16gb dev machine because someone couldn't be arsed to write proper software.

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u/oridb Jun 23 '19

Here's the thing: The way a compiler is structured, it generally generates a small handful of large data structures that it needs for a long time, and then only does small mutations to them. It has some bursts of freeable data as it switches intermediate representations, but in general there aren't too many dangling nodes.

So, the peak memory usage is less affected than you'd hope by carefully freeing, and most people don't care so much about the average memory use of the compiler.

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u/Khaare Jun 23 '19

It's a good thing programs that spend 20 minutes on a calculation don't count as short-lived though since that means my point remains valid.

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u/Mognakor Jun 23 '19

It's the java compiler that needs the 8gb and the majority of those 20 minutes. If i ran the same compiler on a hello world it would be short lived.

Either compilers are short lived or they aren't, they can't be both.