i got into it just because its novel, but I've kept using it because I find that the simplicity + performance + safety makes it very useful for prototyping. Last year I challenged myself to do Advent of Code with V, because I knew I couldn't google the answers + there are very few packages for it (I limited myself to the standard library). I felt like I was back in CS courses, just banging my head against a wall, and it was super fun.
I personally can't say why someone would use it over Go or Rust, but I can say its a joy to write.
Nim is very flexible, and too flexible after you think about it. Compare C with excessive use of macros. That's an antipattern in C and presumably a feature of Nim.
C++ is just too big and slow to compile.
Rust has a reputation of complication and steep learning curve.
Go has the same issues as Node.js -- uncontrolled import of hundreds of weird and unknown and unknowable libraries.
V is opinionated, has a single definition of correct formatting, compiles to fast-enough C, has numerous handy features, is sensitive to multiple platforms and architectures, and has lots of usefully comparable code to learn from and borrow from.
V is not scientific enough, but that depends on the libraries you choose not the language itself (the scientific lib vsl is quite different from the tensor lib).
There are a lot of wanna be scientific languages (Chapel is a particularly good example) but the usual problem is that no-one adopts them because almost no-one else adopts them. Cray Fortran introduced Co-Array Fortran which got some traction but it is almost unheard of both inside and outside the Fortran community. (CAF abstracted from OpenMPI so you could write code that ran on hundreds of CPUs without really caring how or where the code ran.)
Maybe chatgpt or other LLMs will enable effective cross-language translation making it easier to move between interesting language communities. Modulo translation errors of course.
I don’t use it but I always am interested to read about it because people used to say that the V in Vlang was for Vaporware, but I want to see them keep working on their language and succeeding in making the language they want.
I am learning it now, it’s pretty neat. I think the simplicity is a big appeal for me. I’ve tried Nim but it just seemed inconsistent, the case insensitivity is insane, and I think there’s a lot of minor but still odd syntax decisions that have been made. I’d rather just use python, which is nice, than have to finagle my Nim code just for a little speed boost.
Sum types and TCO with -prod is a really nice feature as well. Not supporting TCO was a huge bummer when I tried Nim, and many other languages tbh.
I already use Go sometimes, so picking up vlang was basically free, and I haven’t had time to do any big substantial projects with it, but I wrote a little irc bot with it and had a good afternoon hacking on it.
