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Vinix – A modern operating system written in V

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foul · 1789662157 · focus · HN ↗
How are things going with V btw? In the past i've seen some bad press about this programming language.
1. Matl · 1789668947 · focus · HN ↗
  My understanding:
  - The bad press was because the initial public release on GitHub did not implement most of the things seemed like they're implemented, (Rust like memory safety etc.)
  - Over time it actually saw contributions from a lot of people and is kind of decent now, be it not as polished as Go, Rust, D etc.
  - It is super easy to use, so kind of attracts an audience.
  1. d-us-vb · 1789672877 · focus · HN ↗
    The bad press was because after some people tried to call them out for not shipping features that were claimed in the release, those people were banned from further contribution/commenting on github.
    richbell · 1789736574 · focus · HN ↗
    And the lead dev would come into any thread on HN or Reddit and argue with people.
    Matl · 1789748843 · focus · HN ↗
    Ouch. That's definitely worse than I assumed.
    amedvednikov · 1789887309 · focus · HN ↗
    Only one person, who said "V must die", was banned.
  2. baranul · 1789873937 · focus · HN ↗
    Disagree with the first point. A lot of the so-called "bad press" came very directly from competitors. To the extent that it looked like they were trying to snuff out a rising new language or were arguably engaging in slander, because it seemingly was a threat to the popularity of their own creations.
    Any just released language (talking about when it came out back in 2019), is not going to be polished. That should be common sense. I've never seen a first release alpha of any language be polished or not have have things in a state of partial implementation. 0.1 is not 1.0.
    > Over time it actually saw contributions from a lot of people and is kind of decent now
    True. At present, they have 846 contributors and over 2,300 forks on GitHub.
    > It is super easy to use, so kind of attracts an audience.
    Agree. Ease of use is one of its attractive features. Very much geared towards getting people started, even newbies to programming, and doing useful things.
2. pmkary · 1789717379 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
3. amedvednikov · 1789819260 · focus · HN ↗
  It still compiles in 0.5s:
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV-mzTDUpAI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV-mzTDUpAI
  10k+ bugs fixed, only ~40 open github issues.
  1. foul · 1790154078 · focus · HN ↗
    Hi Alexander, cool! Will return to dabble with it.
novacrazy · 1789662376 · focus · HN ↗
[flagged]
1. ecto · 1789662436 · focus · HN ↗
  How can a language be a scam?
  1. MisterTea · 1789662879 · focus · HN ↗
    I have no opinion on the subject but I have found this to be an interesting dive into the supposed controversy: <a href="https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v" rel="nofollow">https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v
  2. novacrazy · 1789663151 · focus · HN ↗
    The first release was just Go's parser ripped out and bolted onto a barebones first year of college level compiler, and touted as "safer than Rust", "compiles in milliseconds", etc. but didn't even have real type-checking at the time, nor did it free memory, and many other basic functionality. Furthermore, I vividly remember the author's Patreon advertised at the top of the page back then, and for a while he raked in a couple thousand dollars a month for it.
    However, over the years some actually talented people (and nowadays probably LLMs) have somehow sort of fixed most of the biggest warts, but it's still nowhere near what it advertised in that first release.
    morpheos137 · 1789663819 · focus · HN ↗
    Lol this is interesting. If you want to make money you can "invent" a language. With LLMs you could probably make it pretty decent too.
    giancarlostoro · 1789663821 · focus · HN ↗
    What's wild is I was looking at the language's home page again, and looking to find their GitHub, the first GitHub link I noticed, is the GitHub sponsors link.
    I don't mind supporting a project like this, but this is a bit excessive.
    Was it really Go's parser? That wouldn't surprise me, but also that kind of makes sense to me why it looked a bit 'familiar' in terms of syntax.
    It's definitely been "alpha" tier for a while, which it doesnt help that the developer doesn't outline any sort of stability that I can recall (back then at least) which imho if you're publishing a language, you should let the reader know.
    amedvednikov · 1789679265 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it wasn't Go's parser. That's easy to check.
    torstenvl · 1789664077 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you explain what you mean by this? They haven't had a first release yet. They're still in beta.
    novacrazy · 1789664278 · focus · HN ↗
    That's being pedantic. The first public announcement was many years ago.
    torstenvl · 1789664418 · focus · HN ↗
    It appears you're calling something a scam because an early alpha version was early alpha quality. If so, that would be unprofessional and inflammatory.
    I'm open to being wrong. So again, can you explain what you mean?
    novacrazy · 1789664781 · focus · HN ↗
    I have this amazing new thing I'm making, nothing like it, better than everything else. Here's a prototype that does none of that and is _barely_ functional. Care to invest $2000? If so, do I have a bridge to show you...
    wk_end · 1789665467 · focus · HN ↗
    If I go to the vlang releases page, I see literally hundreds of releases <a href="https://github.com/vlang/v/releases" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vlang/v/releases
    They haven't had a stable 1.0 release yet, but they've had many pre-1.0 releases. It's not some personal experiment that's been sitting in the dev's Github that people are piling onto; the author has gone out of their way to promote it, beg for donations, and lash out at any criticisms.
    The issue has never been the quality of the language per se, the issue has been 1) wildly misrepresenting the quality of the language in the present tense; 2) not even having any kind of a realistic roadmap towards achieving the kind of outsized and implausible claims about the quality of the language; and 3) using these outsized, implausible misrepresentations as a way of soliciting hype and funding for the author.
    torstenvl · 1789666975 · focus · HN ↗
    Those comments may be fair. Defamation is not.
    orangedog · 1789668913 · focus · HN ↗
    Defamation? The author's responses and complete lack of honesty certainly made it look like a scam.
    The author listed feature after feature that were unfulfilled. Scam is being fairly kind to the project, I thought the guy was the worst kind of liar. You can check out any of the earlier threads on HN to find out for yourself.
    It isn't that it was early, it's that it advertised itself to be what it was not. You defending it isn't doing anybody any favors as this is all public record and you're just standing up for a dev that doesn't deserve it
    torstenvl · 1789672959 · focus · HN ↗
    It's astounding to me that a critical mass of HN folks are tripling down on conduct that is both obviously immoral and against the site guidelines.
    amedvednikov · 1789818226 · focus · HN ↗
    All listed features are real. Which ones are unfullfilled?
    iamnothere · 1789670898 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    mrkeen · 1789665713 · focus · HN ↗
    For a longer read:
    <a href="https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v" rel="nofollow">https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v
    torstenvl · 1789667173 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. Agreed. Did you intend to respond to someone else?
    jchw · 1789670673 · focus · HN ↗
    The scammy part was definitely making all of the claims as if they were already true. A lot of people sincerely believed it. My recollection was that it took months before some of this was fixed to explain that it wasn't available yet, and then more to explain that it hadn't actually been done yet.
    There were some really crazy ones, like that it could convert entire codebases from C++ to V and then compile them some multiple of times faster and make them memory safe. How? I'd love to know.
    The author to me seems like they are not attempting to scam people, but it's hard to ignore that they were collecting money, from people who thought they had already accomplished these things, because the person collecting it absolutely appeared to be claiming it.
    Now doing that once and going "oops, my bad" would be one thing. There would be no controversy. However, over time it has proven to be a bit of a behavior pattern, which is confusing because the author does appear to be producing things that I think are interesting. Just... often buried under some hyperbole.
    0x457 · 1789670968 · focus · HN ↗
    Can't have use-after-free errors if you never free.
  3. agumonkey · 1789669972 · focus · HN ↗
    It was impossible to verify the "earth shattering claims" of the designer/users early on, and they would be very very emotional every time you just question the metrics. At one point there was a chart that was basically "for a given task, every compiler on earth: 1min, us: 0.1sec"
    And whenever you poke you found it seemed to be comparing apple and oranges and conversations often ended in v users crying because "this is a new project !"
    (yet, the crowd kept growing and they seemed to have produced larger and larger projects with this thing)
    amedvednikov · 1789818271 · focus · HN ↗
    V has always compiled itself in <1s
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvP6wmcl_Sc
    agumonkey · 1789851740 · focus · HN ↗
    afaik it has none of the costly compiling passes..
    amedvednikov · 1789887195 · focus · HN ↗
    Transformer, checker, markused, binary generation are not costly?
    It takes GCC this much time to generate an unoptimized hello world.
    agumonkey · 1789904009 · focus · HN ↗
    i could never find any data on what would allow v to save so much time. i genuinely tried to find objective information, not kneejerk hate. you're the author it seems, so maybe you can give some hints ? i don't believe gcc is the absolute best, but even clang (I didn't check other languages/compilers) was lagging behind in the benchmarks which made me doubt it was not just comparing apple and oranges.
2. ape4 · 1789662624 · focus · HN ↗
  This seems to be the language's main page <a href="https://vlang.io/" rel="nofollow">https://vlang.io/
3. embedding-shape · 1789662963 · focus · HN ↗
  For reference, for the ones who aren't aware of the constant drama that seems to follow V: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=v%20lang%20comments%3E10&sort=byPopularity&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (open up almost any discussion and see the flood of similar messages).
  I never paid enough attention to figure out if the drama is justified or not (and don't really care either, please don't try to convince me to care either, don't shoot the messenger).
  1. iamnothere · 1789671073 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
4. orsenthil · 1789663722 · focus · HN ↗
  The book about the language was published by packt, and I had my eyebrows raised. I want to give a benefit of doubt tough and learn more.
  1. QuantumNomad_ · 1789676317 · focus · HN ↗
    Packt used to give away one book for free every day or something like that years ago. Maybe they still do. I downloaded many of them, and there were a couple of actually good books in the bunch but most of them I found to be too low quality to be worth reading. I came to see Packt as a shovelware place for ebooks. And this was even before LLMs were around. I haven’t visited in years but if I did and it turned out that their current library consists of 99.99% AI written slop it would not surprise me.
    I don’t know if your past experience with Packt is similar, or if you saw Packt publishing a book about V as a surprising positive sign for V.
5. IshKebab · 1789664508 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah it seems to be following the No Man's Sky playbook.
6. EGreg · 1789665924 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't know.
  But I just released a language called U, and I was surprised to see this one.
  <a href="https://ulanguage.org" rel="nofollow">https://ulanguage.org
  1. xvilka · 1789666656 · focus · HN ↗
    Just like V but without sharp edges?
  2. cestith · 1789670539 · focus · HN ↗
    When compiling to C, does it use MISRA C or some other accepted standard for how to write secure and reliable C?
    EGreg · 1789758260 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, C11
    vrighter · 1789825001 · focus · HN ↗
    C11 is the c language version. misra C is a set of guidelines for robust code when lives are on the line.
    One rule is "no malloc after initialization". so no, you probably aren't. Nor should you be. misra is intended for the programmerc not the compiler
    cestith · 1790003517 · focus · HN ↗
    He's emitting C as an intermediate form. I'm asking if the C that's emitted is meeting MISRA or any other recognized standard for secure and robust C code.
    vrighter · 1790074568 · focus · HN ↗
    you can't have a compiler automatically generate misra C. Because misra is a set of programmer discipline guidelines. How would you automatically convert a program that does dynamic allocation into one that preallocates all memory up front in the init phase?
7. netbioserror · 1789667062 · focus · HN ↗
  I've only dipped my toe in, but it compiles fast code and works. Can't argue with results.
8. threethirtytwo · 1789671024 · focus · HN ↗
  Well tbh I don't care about all the PR surrounding the language. Has anyone used it in it's current state? Is it good? Please be objective.
9. ursuscamp · 1789672306 · focus · HN ↗
  I remember the controversy around the original announcement. It seems quaint now, honestly. Simpler times. Slop by those olds standards is practically the Mona Lisa now.
10. dang · 1789676556 · focus · HN ↗
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
  "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
christophilus · 1789665368 · focus · HN ↗
Huh. Pretty cool. I haven't looked at vnix in a while, and it's been almost as long since I looked at V. It had a lot of controversy early on. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has tried it recently to find out if they ever ended up delivering on their promises.
1. 7bit · 1789722811 · focus · HN ↗
  One look at the memory consumption the the calculator app should answer your question.
  1. amedvednikov · 1789887418 · focus · HN ↗
    That's just Cocoa Calculator junk.
    I tried porting Cocoa and decided not to. Will remove.
    Native V Calculator uses 4 MB of RAM.
phoe-krk · 1789665772 · focus · HN ↗
I enjoy the screenshot showing Calculator taking 617 MB of RAM. It feels very modern indeed.
1. bflesch · 1789665856 · focus · HN ↗
  You have an amazing eye for details. Might be the "wine calculator" from the desktop.
  1. dTal · 1789720299 · focus · HN ↗
    No, that's shown lower down with Redmond chrome. maybe the "cocoa calculator"?
2. _s_a_m_ · 1789678110 · focus · HN ↗
  the desktop needs 41mb so that must be some external stuff with overhead
3. amedvednikov · 1789819158 · focus · HN ↗
  That's just Cocoa Calculator junk.
  I tried porting Cocoa and decided not to. Will remove.
4. baranul · 1789871711 · focus · HN ↗
  There are many different calculators to choose from, including being able to make your own or an example one from VUI or VUI2. Any of these other calculators would be using 10 times less RAM. Therefore, seems like trying to make something out of nothing.
bflesch · 1789665814 · focus · HN ↗
It looks nice. How much vibecoding does it contain? Can we trust these claims?
1. mapcars · 1789673296 · focus · HN ↗
  V is a super young language, I wonder if llms even can produce decent code with it.
  1. vips7L · 1789832421 · focus · HN ↗
    Can they produce decent code at all?
codethief · 1789666115 · focus · HN ↗
> QEMU uses macOS hardware virtualization for the ARM64 desktop.
Huh, since when does QEMU support hardware virtualization on Apple Silicon? To the best of my knowledge, among all the VM managers available on macOS (VMware, Parallels, VirtualBox, …) only UTM currently supports hardware virtualization and that's through the Apple Virtualization backend, not through QEMU.
1. vluft · 1789668222 · focus · HN ↗
  HVF was added quite some time ago afaik.
2. iAMkenough · 1789676808 · focus · HN ↗
  Parallels also uses Apple Virtualization Framework since Apple improved it in 2024.
bluesounddirect · 1789668966 · focus · HN ↗
Its and odd name choice and very close to venix <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venix" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venix
1. zem · 1789669811 · focus · HN ↗
  it seems like a natural name choice to me - "v + unix"
  1. baranul · 1789884094 · focus · HN ↗
    Vlang + Unix = Vinix (name choice). I suppose they could of went with Vunix, but "Vin-ix" flows better with both "Lin-ux" and "U-nix".
    Think the majority or the V community, would vote for Vinix as the best name.
nosrep · 1789669271 · focus · HN ↗
huh, that "minecraft" screenshot is pretty clearly minetest/luanti. the vinix repo has some code at least attempting to do real Minecraft, but does it actually work?
1. amedvednikov · 1789887259 · focus · HN ↗
  I've updated the screenshot. Here's real Minecraft running on Vinix:
  <a href="https://vinix-os.org/assets/vinix-minecraft.png?1" rel="nofollow">https://vinix-os.org/assets/vinix-minecraft.png?1
  1. aw1621107 · 1789944501 · focus · HN ↗
    As I responded to your similar comment elsewhere [0], the UI layout doesn't seem to match actual Minecraft. Did you upload the right screenshot?
    [0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49780872">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49780872
    baranul · 1790418761 · focus · HN ↗
    Apparently, both Minecraft and Minetest can run on Vinix. Appears to be nothing to get weird about.
    The picture given looks like Minecraft. Here is a video of a person playing Minecraft and the picture given matches up.
    [0]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMt89OMYk4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMt89OMYk4
    aw1621107 · 1790770118 · focus · HN ↗
    > The screenshot appears to be nothing to get repeatedly weird about.
    > The picture given looks like Minecraft.
    That is because you're looking at the picture now, after it has been fixed.
WD-42 · 1789669639 · focus · HN ↗
First time I heard about V was because of the Volt desktop chat app: <a href="https://volt-app.com/" rel="nofollow">https://volt-app.com/ which seemed attractive at the time. Turns out it was completely closed source and read secrets from local browser's cookie storage without any kind of warning. I've never nope'd out of a program so fast.
There are others in this comment section claiming this language is scam. Seems about right. The entire Vinix page is slop, too.
1. ChoosesBarbecue · 1789674929 · focus · HN ↗
  It had like two releases after ~2-3 years of hype, too. Maybe long, back when it was called eul.
2. alpaca128 · 1789679276 · focus · HN ↗
  If I remember correctly the language promised automatic memory management without downsides, but then instead of implementing that magical feature they started working on a GUI library and whatnot. Apparently now they've moved onto a whole OS while the autofree feature is still "experimental"
13415 · 1789670705 · focus · HN ↗
I don't use it yet but V has pretty much all properties I want from a programming language. I'll check out Vinix, too. I'm almost certain I'll program a significant project in V some time when it has matured a bit. The fact that users of languages I find useless hate it is also a big plus.
iamnothere · 1789671626 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
ddellacosta · 1789671718 · focus · HN ↗
Omarchy is looking sick
pholypilz · 1789673636 · focus · HN ↗
YAAAAY! ANOTHER (long-term useless) "HOBBY" OS!
polotics · 1789675947 · focus · HN ↗
Can you explain what you meant with this sentence on that page you wrote:
"That is the whole system, not a stripped-down mode you switch into."
1. [deleted] · 1789677819 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
2. alpaca128 · 1789678958 · focus · HN ↗
  Nothing, because that was written by an LLM.
3. sunaookami · 1789683098 · focus · HN ↗
  This is the Claude-ism that I despise the most, when it states something that was never asked because it leaked from the prompt/context. Claude's writing has regressed so much, it's only usable for "raw coding" now.
4. amedvednikov · 1789819196 · focus · HN ↗
  Reworded and simplified.
ravenical · 1789676617 · focus · HN ↗
That's... not Minecraft. That's some weird voxel game attempting, poorly, to clone Minecraft. Doesn't really bode well, imo.
1. amedvednikov · 1789887347 · focus · HN ↗
  I've updated the screenshot. Here's real Minecraft running on Vinix:
  <a href="https://vinix-os.org/assets/vinix-minecraft.png?2" rel="nofollow">https://vinix-os.org/assets/vinix-minecraft.png?2
  1. aw1621107 · 1789944154 · focus · HN ↗
    That still doesn't seem right? The UI doesn't match any version of Minecraft I can recall, at least, and from a brief search it seems a closer fit to Minetest's UI.
    aw1621107 · 1790211040 · focus · HN ↗
    Note for later readers: The image seems to have been successfully updated some time between the previous comment and this one and shows something that looks much more like Minecraft.
mdtrooper · 1789679229 · focus · HN ↗
It sounds great because the license is GPLv2, instead for example Redox OS is MIT.
1. sheepscreek · 1789692211 · focus · HN ↗
  How is that better? MIT is much more permissive.
  1. Narishma · 1789695104 · focus · HN ↗
    That's not necessarily a good thing.
kovariance · 1789682108 · focus · HN ↗
sloperating system
calvinmorrison · 1789695154 · focus · HN ↗
Can one have a "modern" OS that is a UNIX clone?
himujjal · 1789730794 · focus · HN ↗
Kudos to the efforts. No matter the past. We have an operating system. That is a big news. And that too with a GUI. Is it robust and production ready now? No.
But this is what we should be celebrating. Something that came out of people's efforts and hard work.
Maybe in a few years of iteration it will reach a stage where we can actually use it for simple tasks or even as a remote execution setup.
Always good to have options. Also for a programming language that actually enabled the creation of this OS, that is big news! Great going guys!
1. childintime · 1789739943 · focus · HN ↗
  Indeed, and it must be great for educational purposes.
2. baranul · 1789872004 · focus · HN ↗
  > But this is what we should be celebrating. Something that came out of people's efforts and hard work
  Agree. Any attempt at negativity is unnecessary. Many of us just like programming and open-source projects.
  Vinix is a fun OS to play with or contribute to.

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