V, also known as vlang, is an in-development statically typed, compiled programming language created by Alexander Medvednikov in early 2019. It was inspired by Go, and other programming languages including Oberon, Swift, and Rust. It is free and open-source software released under the MIT License, and currently in beta.
The goals of V include ease of use, readability, and maintainability.
The new language was created as a result of frustration with existing languages being used for personal projects. It was originally intended for personal use, but after being mentioned publicly and increasing interest, it was decided to make it public. V was initially created to develop a desktop messaging client named Volt. On public release, the compiler was written in V, and could compile itself. Key design goals in creating V were being easy to learn and use, higher readability, fast compiling, increased safety, efficient development, cross-platform usability, improved C interoperability, better error handling, modern features, and more maintainable software.
V is developed, maintained, and released through GitHub by developers and contributors internationally. In 2025, V started being ranked on the TIOBE index.
V has policies to facilitate memory-safety, speed, and secure code, including various default features for greater program safety. It employs bounds checking, to guard against out of bounds use of variables. Option/result types are used, where the option data type () can be represented by (among possible choices) and the result type () can handle any returned errors. To ensure greater safety, error checking is mandatory. By default, the following are immutable: variables, structs, and function arguments. This includes string values are immutable, so elements cannot be mutated. Other protections, which are the default for the language, are: no use of undefined values, variable shadowing, null pointers (unless marked as unsafe), or global variables (unless enabled via flag).
V uses value types and string buffers to reduce memory allocations. The language can be compiled to human-readable C, and in terms of execution and compilation, it's considered to be as performant.
V supports four memory management options:
V supports a source-to-source compiler (transpiler) and can translate C code into V.
Working translators are also being developed for Go, JavaScript, and WebAssembly.
The "Hello, World!" program in V:
Variables are immutable by default and are defined using and a value. Use the reserved word (keyword) to make them mutable. Mutable variables can be assigned to using :
Redeclaring a variable, whether in an inner scope or in the same scope, is not allowed:
Struct example:
By default, structs are allocated on the stack. When structs are referenced by using the prefix or have the attribute, they are allocated on the heap instead:
Methods in V are functions defined with a receiver argument. The receiver appears in its own argument list between the keyword and the method name. Methods must be in the same module as the receiver type.
The enrolled_status method (below) has a receiver of type named . The convention is not to use receiver names like self or this, but preferably a short name. For example:
Result types may represent an error returned from a function. Result types are declared by prepending :
Optional types may represent . Option types prepend to the type name: .