v2go

README

v2go

v2go translates V code to Go.

STATUS: Active Development | Alpha Quality

Getting Started

Fetch, build, and install it:

go get github.com/elimisteve/v2go
go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports

Try it out:

cd $(go env GOPATH)/src/github.com/elimisteve/v2go
cat ./test_v_files/hello_world.v
v2go run ./test_v_files/hello_world.v

Or, for a more interesting example:

cd $(go env GOPATH)/src/github.com/elimisteve/v2go
cat ./test_v_files/links_scraper2.v
v2go run ./test_v_files/links_scraper2.v

v2go run ./path/to/mycode.v translates the given .v file(s) into Go, then tells Go to build and run them -- all with one command! 🎉

To just translate your .v files without also running the translated Go files afterward:

v2go translate ./test_v_files/*.v

Now you can run them as one normally would:

go run ./test_v_files/hello_world.go
go run ./test_v_files/hello_world_interpolated.go
go run ./test_v_files/links_scraper2.go
go run ./test_v_files/guess.go

For a bit more info, run

v2go help

Now go forth and write useful, world-changing software!

Why v2go?

As someone who thinks a lot about the future of computer programming, and as someone who's been coding for 10 years, I consider V to be by far the best-designed programming language of all time.

Why? Because V gives us the simplicity, compilation speed, and concurrency model of Go; the safety and runtime speed of Rust; and the syntactic convenience of a scripting language like Python.

The only problem is that V is very new and does not have much code that V programmers can use; V was open-sourced just last month, and the C-to-V translator c2v has not quite been released yet.

Thus, this short-term solution of v2go, which translates V code into Go so that all existing Go code can be used today while enjoying the benefits of V.

v2go enables us to use the brilliant simplicity of V's syntax while importing arbitrary Go code today.

v2go does not yet support translating imported V code (e.g., from its standand library), so I recommend simply importing Go code directly; v2go will not rewrite these import paths.

Near-future Work

• Consider first compiling the given .v files with the V compiler so as to benefit from the additional safely checks that V has and Go doesn't (e.g., enforcing immutability and ensuring that all errors are checked)
• Make v2go much more robust by making it a legit compiler with a lexer, parser, AST walking, etc

Less-near-future Work

Probably not to be done by me:

• Write go2v, a Go-to-V translator/transpiler/compiler

Why? So that the V standard library and more of its runtime can be auto-generated rather than manually written (how old-fashioned that would be!)

Hacking on v2go

Get started in the same way as stated above:

go get github.com/elimisteve/v2go
go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports
cd $(go env GOPATH)/src/github.com/elimisteve/v2go

Make sure all tests pass:

go test ./translate

Hack on. ✊ Consider starting by creating an issue with a proposed new feature, or by submitting a pull request.

More About V

See https://vlang.io/, especially https://vlang.io/docs. For a comparison of V to other languages, see https://vlang.io/compare.