TL;DR: Rust is great, but somewhere along the way, I learned that I was too dumb to read and write Rust. As I worked on larger and larger Rust projects, I also became frustrated with the developer experience of working in Rust (slow compile time), so I wanted a better way.

Vu's language changed a bit over time but the core principles remained the same:

1. It should be easy to read and write 2. It should be memory safe 3. It should be fast to run 4. It should be fast to compile

Here's how I approached each:

1. Vu is syntactically very close to Python. The ownership rules are the ones Rust has, but I personally find it a lot easier to parse and understand. I've tested this with various LLMs and found it can read and write Vu out the box because of the similarity to Python.

2. Vu uses the same principles of Rust. Every value has one owner, borrows can't escape or outlive what they borrow, and nothing changes while it's borrowed.

3. Vu compiles down to C at the end of the day, so everything runs approximately at C speeds.

4. vuc check on the compiler’s own source (about 21,500 lines of Vu), takes about 0.4~ s. This check covers parsing, type and borrow checking. cargo check on a Rust project that size usually takes several seconds from scratch. Then there are other opinionated language decisions. Vu has no macros, Vu's borrow checker is lighter weight than Rust's with simpler interfaces and generics.

However, in the past few years, as Vu's language evolved and AI began to take over, I expanded Vu's principles to include a couple additional principles:

5. It should be secure 6. It should be efficient for LLMs to write

5. I want to pen test Vu in public. In https://github.com/vu0tran/vu/tree/main/tests, you'll see a battery of tests where I'm trying to basically pwn Vu. There are explicit language decisions in there as well that tries to prevent a host of security flaws that exist in other languages, e.g, integer overflow stops the program instead of quietly wrapping around.

6. The syntax of Vu is designed to be tokenizer efficient. In addition, when Vu checks throws errors, the errors are designed to be token efficient and written in a way that guides LLMs to more easily fix bugs, reducing turns overall.

So, in summary, Vu is still experimental. The compiler is 21,500 lines of Vu and compiles itself. The standard library also has TLS, HTTP/2, WebSockets and a PostgreSQL client, all tested against Python’s implementations and hostile input. I think most of the pieces are there. It does also compile down also to WebAssembly so you can play around w/ the checker on the website!

Feel free to try to break it!

What's next: 1. Figure out how to get Vu to perform faster than Rust 2. Rewrite some OSS libraries in Vu to further prove the language

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276431

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Predicting the future is hard and people are never 100% correct.

As I've transitioned to working on AI, I think the average person doesn't understand how there's a gigantic underbelly that's just purely dedicated to pornographic use – whether that's in erotic roleplaying with LLMs, or generating pornographic images with diffusion models. It's massive, but largely not talked about and remains out of view.

From my experience, when you go from text to image, it's basically an order of magnitude change in the dopamine response.

When you go from image to video, it's essentially another order of magnitude.

What I'm trying to say is... I don't think we're ready for what's to come...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44696922

Points: 14

# Comments: 23

[2] If anyone wants a weekly report, submit your email here: http://eepurl.com/h8Q-UD

From July 30th 2018 to July 30th 2022, price to sales ratio has changed accordingly:

Ecommerce: -21.4%

Travel: -23.8%

SaaS: -27.0%

EdTech: -69.6%

FinTech: -26.3%

Healthcare: +14.9%

Supplychain: -27.9%

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32473229

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32418029

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32404024

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

$40M revenue, $11B valuation. What were they thinking!?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32309751

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

If things don’t look right, our defaults might be off - please feel free to change those if they’re too different from what you’d expect.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32267558

Points: 18

# Comments: 1

Uber / Lyft get a multiple of about 1x. DoorDash gets 4x. Instacart did $1.8B in revenue so even at a generous 6x multiple, it's only $11B...

(FYI, your data is only saved on localstorage for now)

I basically just wanted an excuse to create something fun this weekend. I struggled to find a very simple to use app where I could just start writing for the sake of writing. Some other problems I have:

1. Full text indexing isn't great on many of these writing apps (not like I have that right now though lol) 2. Using google docs at night melts my eyes 3. Other writing apps focus too much on publishing, which detracts from writing 4. I want more tools to eventually help me write (no idea what this means)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820940

Points: 14

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12400269

Points: 7

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12399762

Points: 11

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848486

Points: 4

# Comments: 0