Think it's more along the lines of Jon having the ability to create a language, and upon being dissatisfied with what he was using, decided to make his own.
GitHub is littered with pet languages that people have made, and doubt their reasons are simply about being "eye-wateringly arrogant".
Moving past that, people paying attention or wanting to use the language, usually means it appeals to them. Jai has fans and supporters, because they are able to look past or are not concerned about his personality quirks, but are focused on the quality and usefulness of the software produced.
This "negative reputation" on here, looks to be something that was first artificially generated by competitors and then allowed to boil, along with those using the bubbling to promote themselves and their sites.
The issue is that autofree is not a 100% solution by itself, in all circumstances. Thus it relies on the existing GC, in situations that it's not. The V developers have already hinted at using alternatives to the GC, for that remaining percentage, so memory safety without the GC is on the table for them.
Based on what I've read and hints dropped, can see them adding some type of additional DFA and borrow checker, somewhat like D, to be combined with autofree. Awareness of this possibility, might be why V's competitors have been so overly focused on them. As we are talking about combining it to an easier to use language, with cleaner syntax.
Autofree can be combined with other memory management methods, besides GC, and is something V developers have hinted at multiple times. Until autofree becomes the focus of the project, combining it with the already existing GC, looks to have been and is more convenient.
> Autofree can be combined with other memory management methods, besides GC, and is something V developers have hinted at multiple times.
I'm just working off of what I could easily find, particularly in public docs. If the V devs have hinted at possibilities other than manual memory management and GC, then you are certainly better positioned than me to know about them.
Are the hints you mention publicly visible somewhere? Would be interesting to see more details if they're available.
This is basically admitting to gross manipulation and even censorship by "we're optimizing for", "we try to elevate", and "we try to demote things", which looks to be based on personal or corporate biases and tastes.
Hacker News can only be "figured out", relative to what looks like the biases and financial interests of ownership and its staff, where they do the "pushing" (elevating) and "demoting". This "state of curiosity" being referred to, appears to include wanting readers to blindly accept what is fed to them, and ignore or not question strange inconsistencies.
Newcomers and outsiders would usually be expecting transparency, honesty, and impartiality. Their confusion, can be when they notice the difference in moderation based on adhering to a clear and obvious standard versus the hidden, strange, inexplicable, or unequal treatment.
HN has always been a curated site [1]. That's all that "we try to elevate X and demote Y" means. The frontpage is produced by a combination of community, software, and moderation [2]. All three are necessary - without any one of these, the site would be a completely different place.
Despite how dark and sinister you've made everything sound, you've mostly just rephrased what I wrote, with a lot of pejoratives. In that sense, you're right—there isn't much disagreement here. You just think we're wrong and bad to run HN the way we do, and that's fine.
In agreement, that this looks like a false dichotomy being presented to readers, C-derived versus Rust. First, Rust is usually considered or positioned as a C-family language, despite its ML connection. Second, in the context of C alternatives, there are many other memory-safe languages (Golang, Vlang, Dlang, etc...). Third, the context of when Rust is really needed (as a high-level language), is few.
Many of the high level features that Rust offers, outside of memory-safety, other C-family languages have too. And those other languages can have different advantages over Rust: easier to learn, easier to use, readability, compilation speed, etc... Very much a depends type of thing.
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