Could someone explain to me why, after seeing how many exaggerated claims the author has made, they have invested their time into building up a community around it?
I'd be straight up terrified to trust anything serious with this guy's work.
In this instance, the demo won't even load for me and the documentation page can't be bothered to put the most basic of padding in it. Why even release publicly?
For instance, when asked how the memory management system works, here you see a team member give the standard response: the compiler inserts calls to free when it detects the variable is no longer used. This seems reasonable to anyone who hasn't thought much about PL/compilers before. But when pressed further, you see Alex admit "most stuff is simply cloned ATM" which is in stark contrast to the "autofree handles 90-100% of objects for you" on their homepage.
Or this where Alex shows he has no idea what UB is?
UB is a property of the language's abstract machine. Common C UB like dereferencing a null pointer or signed integer overflow has well defined semantics on basically any commodity hardware manufactured in three decades and yet it is still UB not because of the runtime properties but because the C abstract machine says it can't happen and compilers are free to optimize based on that assumption. For a language that compiles to C and claims no UB, the author should have a much better understanding of this.
I confess that I've found it both enraging and depressing to see that the "bootstrapped-by-hype" model works even in programming language development, which I had (naively, I guess) assumed would be more immune to that sort of thing. I suppose the field is composed of fallible humans just like any other.
It's not even a question of "how bad". There was way too much PR given how immature the project was, at least at the time. I don't think the author had had a lot of experience as a language designer / compiler implementer when the project was started. One advertised feature of the compiler was its supposed simplicity, such as getting along without an AST. I doubt this was a good choice and I think they ended up adding one in.
In my perception it was mostly sold as a piece of engineering by PR like this (quote from OP): Cheapest server $160 $20 $3.50 [2]
"Lots" is very, very subjective. What country do you live in? I would say (as an appreciative donor/patron myself) there has been very, very little in the way of direct donations to the founder himself. This is no "get rich quick" scheme. Frankly I don't know of any programming language that's ever been such a quickie in this regard.
I'd be straight up terrified to trust anything serious with this guy's work.
In this instance, the demo won't even load for me and the documentation page can't be bothered to put the most basic of padding in it. Why even release publicly?
Promises, promises.