Book Image

Getting Started with V Programming

By : Navule Pavan Kumar Rao
4 (1)
Book Image

Getting Started with V Programming

4 (1)
By: Navule Pavan Kumar Rao

Overview of this book

A new language on the block, V comes with a promising set of features such as fast compilation and interoperability with other programming languages. This is the first book on the V programming language, packed with concise information and a walkthrough of all the features you need to know to get started with the language. The book begins by covering the fundamentals to help you learn about the basic features of V and the suite of built-in libraries available within the V ecosystem. You'll become familiar with primitive data types, declaring variables, arrays, and maps. In addition to basic programming, you'll develop a solid understanding of the building blocks of programming, including functions, structs, and modules in the V programming language. As you advance through the chapters, you'll learn how to implement concurrency in V Programming, and finally learn how to write test cases for functions. This book takes you through an end-to-end project that will guide you to build fast and maintainable RESTful microservices by leveraging the power of V and its built-in libraries. By the end of this V programming book, you'll be well-versed with the V programming language and be able to start writing your own programs and applications.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to the V Programming Language
4
Section 2: Basics of V Programming
12
Section 3: Advanced Concepts in V Programming

Simple and maintainable syntax

As we've already learned, V is inspired by the Go programming language, and its design has also been influenced by Oberon, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, and Python. V comes with the simplest form of coding style when it comes to syntax and semantics. If you are a Go programmer, writing a program in V gives you an adrenaline rush because of the simplicity of the syntax. The syntactic simplicity offered by V lets beginners of this programming language learn quickly and understand the basics instead of trying to learn about the semantics.

V takes a similar or even fewer number of LOCs to mimic functionality written in Go. It has only one standard format for writing code, and this is managed by vfmt, a built-in library that helps format the code. vfmt strictly formats your code according to a globally unique coding standard across all V projects.

All it takes to write a simple program in V is just the following three LOCs:

fn main() {
    println('Hello, from V lang!')
}

You don't even need fn main() { and the closing bracket, }. Just place the following line in a file named hello.v and run it using the v run hello.v command:

println('Hello, from V lang!')

In contrast to V, where we can write a simple program in just a line, a similar program written in Go, after formatting, takes at least seven LOCs, which appear as follows:

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello from Go lang!")
}

As you can see, compared to the preceding code, the V program shown earlier looks concise and minimal while at the same time offering readability and avoiding a lot of unnecessary imports.