The V Programming Language

vlang.io | Docs | Changelog | Speed

Key Features of V

• Simplicity: the language can be learned in less than an hour
• Fast compilation: ≈100k — 1.2 million loc/s
• Easy to develop: V compiles itself in less than a second
• Performance: within 3% of C
• Safety: no null, no globals, no undefined behavior, immutability by default
• C to V translation
• Hot code reloading
• Cross-platform UI library
• Built-in graphics library
• Easy cross compilation
• REPL
• Built-in ORM
• C and JavaScript backends

A stable 0.2 release is planned for April 2020. Right now V is in an alpha stage.

Installing V from source

Linux, macOS, Windows, *BSD, Solaris, WSL, Android, Raspbian

git clone https://github.com/vlang/v
cd v
make

That's it! Now you have a V executable at [path to V repo]/v. [path to V repo] can be anywhere.

(On Windows make means running make.bat, so make sure you use cmd.exe.)

V is being constantly updated. To update V, simply run:

v up

C compiler

You'll need Clang or GCC or Visual Studio. If you are doing development, you most likely already have one of those installed.

Otherwise, follow these instructions:

• Installing a C compiler on Linux and macOS

• Installing a C compiler on Windows

Symlinking

You can create a /usr/local/bin/v symlink so that V is globally available:

sudo ./v symlink

Docker

Expand Docker instructions

git clone https://github.com/vlang/v
cd v
docker build -t vlang .
docker run --rm -it vlang:latest
v

Docker with Alpine/musl:

git clone https://github.com/vlang/v
cd v
docker build -t vlang --file=Dockerfile.alpine .
docker run --rm -it vlang:latest
/usr/local/v/v

Testing and running the examples

Make sure V can compile itself:

v -o v2 cmd/v

$ v
V 0.1.x
Use Ctrl-C or `exit` to exit

>>> println('hello world')
hello world
>>>

cd examples
v hello_world.v && ./hello_world    # or simply
v run hello_world.v                 # this builds the program and runs it right away

v word_counter.v && ./word_counter cinderella.txt
v run news_fetcher.v
v run tetris/tetris.v

In order to build Tetris and anything else using the graphics module, you will need to install glfw and freetype libraries.

If you plan to use the http package, you also need to install OpenSSL on non-Windows systems.

macOS:
brew install glfw freetype openssl

Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt install libglfw3 libglfw3-dev libfreetype6-dev libssl-dev

Arch/Manjaro:
sudo pacman -S glfw-x11 freetype2

Fedora:
sudo dnf install glfw glfw-devel freetype-devel

Windows:
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/ubawurinna/freetype-windows-binaries [path to v repo]/thirdparty/freetype/

glfw dependency will be removed soon.

V UI

https://github.com/vlang/ui

Troubleshooting

https://github.com/vlang/v/wiki/Troubleshooting

Contributing

Code structure:

https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

If you introduce a breaking change and rebuild V, you will no longer be able to use V to build itself. So it's a good idea to make a backup copy of a working compiler executable.