The V Programming Language 0.1.x

https://vlang.io

Documentation: https://vlang.io/docs

Twitter: https://twitter.com/v_language

Discord (primary community): https://discord.gg/n7c74HM

Installing V: https://github.com/vlang/v#installing-v-from-source

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
• Powerful UI and graphics libraries
• Easy cross compilation
• REPL
• Built-in ORM
• C and JavaScript backends

V 1.0 release is planned for December 2019. Right now V is in an alpha stage.

Installing V from source

Linux, macOS, Windows, *BSD, 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.

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:

https://github.com/vlang/v/wiki/Installing-a-C-compiler-on-Linux-macOS

github.com/vlang/v/wiki/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

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

Testing and running the examples

Make sure V can compile itself:

v -o v compiler

$ v
V 0.1.x
Use Ctrl-D 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.

v install glfw

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

glfw dependency will be removed soon.

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.