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 actively being developed, maintained, and released through GitHub by developers and contributors internationally. In 2025, V became among the languages that have been listed on 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 none (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 4 memory management options:

V supports a source-to-source compiler (transpiler) and can translate C code into V.