Following the launch of an open source version of the language in June 2019, the V programming language development team has just released version 0.2 of the language, which is the first major version of the language. In this release, the main focus of the team was on stability and memory management at compile time. However, several other new features have been introduced by Vlang 0.2, including channels and locks, input / output (I / O) flows, structural embedding, etc.

The programming language was created by Alex Medvedniko, a Dutch developer who says he is very committed to simplicity and performance. According to Alex, anything you can do with other existing languages ​​is also doable with V. Alex indicated that he created the V language to carry out his Volt project. Speaking of Volt, it refers to a native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Matrix, Telegram, Twitch, and many other services. Volt eliminates the need for you to have a dozen apps to reach all your contacts on different platforms.

During the presentation of the V language in March 2019, Alex indicated that it has many characteristics that most often attract developers, including its speed and security, its lightness and its ability to translate all of your C projects. / C ++. He added that the entire V language and its standard library are under 400KB. V’s documentation also says it can compile up to 1.2 million lines of code per second per processor core. Prior to its public release, early access was offered in May for those who joined the language community as a premium member.

When it was released as an open source project in June 2019, Alex and the other developers reported that V lives up to its commitment, staying simple, fast, secure and compiled for developers of maintainable software. The language was released as open source with features such as fast compilation of code written in V, language security, C / C ++ translator, code hot reload to instantly take into account changes, and size. very minimal of about 400KB, because it does not contain dependencies.

Besides this, V’s documentation indicates that it is similar to Go (Golang), a programming language developed by Google and first released in November 2009. V is also influenced by Oberon, Rust, and Swift. On the performance side, the team believes that V is as fast as the C, while offering interoperability with the latter.

The feature most highlighted by the developers of V in this version of the language is memory management. Indeed, memory management is one aspect of a language that has one of the biggest influences on the way it behaves: it affects the type system and the types of types you can have, it affects efficiency in time and space, it affects the cognitive model of the programmer in which data structures can be represented, etc. Additionally, it affects latency, interoperability, and more.

But it seems to be often ignored and almost invisible at the same time. Many developers consider this to be a “fixed” problem, since probably 95% of programming languages ​​use some form of garbage collection: you have to allocate, then worry about recovering inaccessible objects later. Perhaps the problem, according to some, is that for a very long time there were not many alternatives. Low-level languages ​​would use manual memory management (efficient, but prone to errors), and some have used reference counting.