Packt used to give away one book for free every day or something like that years ago. Maybe they still do. I downloaded many of them, and there were a couple of actually good books in the bunch but most of them I found to be too low quality to be worth reading. I came to see Packt as a shovelware place for ebooks. And this was even before LLMs were around. I haven’t visited in years but if I did and it turned out that their current library consists of 99.99% AI written slop it would not surprise me.

I don’t know if your past experience with Packt is similar, or if you saw Packt publishing a book about V as a surprising positive sign for V.

There’s good kinds of drama (competent dev forcefully rejects bad ideas) and bad kinds of drama (activist/corporate takeovers, subpar dev doubles down on mistakes, etc), but I haven’t been following it, so I have no idea which one this is.

The first release was just Go's parser ripped out and bolted onto a barebones first year of college level compiler, and touted as "safer than Rust", "compiles in milliseconds", etc. but didn't even have real type-checking at the time, nor did it free memory, and many other basic functionality. Furthermore, I vividly remember the author's Patreon advertised at the top of the page back then, and for a while he raked in a couple thousand dollars a month for it.

However, over the years some actually talented people (and nowadays probably LLMs) have somehow sort of fixed most of the biggest warts, but it's still nowhere near what it advertised in that first release.

I have no opinion on the subject but I have found this to be an interesting dive into the supposed controversy: https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v

It was impossible to verify the "earth shattering claims" of the designer/users early on, and they would be very very emotional every time you just question the metrics. At one point there was a chart that was basically "for a given task, every compiler on earth: 1min, us: 0.1sec"

And whenever you poke you found it seemed to be comparing apple and oranges and conversations often ended in v users crying because "this is a new project !"

(yet, the crowd kept growing and they seemed to have produced larger and larger projects with this thing)

Just like V but without sharp edges?

When compiling to C, does it use MISRA C or some other accepted standard for how to write secure and reliable C?