Has anyone played with V (https://vlang.io/)? Is it any good? And relatedly, are there any other C++/Rust competitors to check out (I’m thinking e.g. Jai and Lobster)?

V got a lot of bad press when it first announced because it overpromised, under-delivered, and had a very caustic founder that fought with everyone... But it's apparently smoothed out since then. Don't how good it is now. Now I'll plug my favorite: Nim. Similar niche, systems level language, but with lisp style macros. (And looks more like Python or Pascal.) There is also Zig, Odin, and D-lang in the alternative systems language space.

Scopes "...was started as an alternative to C++ for programming computer games and related tools" ... "is written in about 30k lines of C++ code, supports a LLVM as well as a SPIR-V backend (targeting both CPU and GPU with a single codebase), and exports a minimal runtime environment" ... "The language is expression-based, but primarily imperative. The syntactical style marries concepts from Scheme and Python". So yeah, perhaps check it out 🙂 I haven't play with it yet but I keep an eye over it.

I always forget about Scopes! That is a really neat language too! 😄

it sounds very interesting, but also a lil esoteric and mostly a one man project which makes it a bit risky. In that regard, Nim is a lot more established already. Me personally, I'm leaning toward Kotlin... In fact, if one considers Kotlin/Native, perhaps it could be put in this list. I'm sure there must be a way to escape the garbage collector.

Zig is very interesting, especially the comptime construct that gives a lot of stuff like generics for free. https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/assorted-thoughts-on-zig-and-rust/

Tnx!!