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Of all the "Better C" programming languages I've tried so far, Odin is my favorite. Somehow it feels very ergonomic and familiar to a C programmer. Zig has many cool things, but I'm always second guessing myself and trying to figure out the "right" way to do things. But writing Odin is really nice and feels fun.
I have high expectations from Odin going forward, but there are some pain points hopefully will get resolved in the future. - The toolchain is alright at best (I know this is being worked on right now). - Discord only communication with the community. They're all very nice but sometimes I wish a lot of these discussions should be indexed by a search engine.
I started using Odin just recently, I'm very happy with it so far, it's exactly what I needed, a mix between Go (no garbage collector) and C, context system, bunch of allocators available, a sane module system (folder based) and tagged union.. very good stuff
And they have a very polished language server https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols That helped me learn Odin in few hours only
Give it a try, you might like it!
> Go (no garbage collector)
Well, that’s incorrect: https://www.sobyte.net/post/2021-12/golang-garbage-collector...
I should have perhaps wrote "without", as an argument why I enjoy odin, my english isn't great, my bad
Or maybe I misunderstand your comment?
Related:
A Review of the Odin Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799499 - Sept 2022 (140 comments)
I like Odin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32626543 - Aug 2022 (204 comments)
Odin Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394000 - Feb 2022 (42 comments)
Looking into Odin and Zig - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440579 - Sept 2021 (27 comments)
The Odin Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22199942 - Jan 2020 (141 comments)
The Odin Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20075638 - June 2019 (3 comments)
I've been using odin on some side projects (mostly game dev). I narrowed down my choices to Odin and Zig. After building toy projects with both, I settled on Odin. I like that it feels fairly high level, but still gives you so much control over memory layout.
Just out of curiosity, what framework have you been using inside Oding for gamedev? Raylib?
Yeah I’ve been using raylib essentially just as a pixel buffer because I’m working on a pixel sim.
I'd love to read a write-up once you're done :)
This one is going to take a while, but I'll definitely put something out when it's done.
Tried it and enjoyed the simplicity and productivity. I wish I would have been able to do more with it but the lack of docs stopped me somewhere along the path. To me the overview page is not enough, it doesn’t go much into details. The packages documentation page is hard to navigate, you either know what you’re looking for or just get lost. Same for code examples. The only way to have a better grasp of some stuff is by asking on Discord, which I don’t like doing. It would be great if something like “The Odin book”(like rust has) goes live
Odin looks extremely appealing to me, but I am quite sad about the lack of methods, or more specifically, lack of guarantees about "dot-autocomplete" support in mainstream code editors. But I do think methods make code more concise and readable too ( object_verb(obj) vs. obj.verb() ). They are syntactic sugar worth having.
In 2023, tooling is at the point where RTFM is secondary for mainstream lang libraries (TFM being embedded into the editor in intelligent ways). I will not go back.
IIRC, the odin language server now has method "dot-autocomplete" support that will reformat it into the function call with the variable as the first parameter.
https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols
Method-syntax is more than syntactic sugar.
It is not just about getting a function from an object and then executing that function.
It is executing that function in the context of the object from which you get it, by utilizing the pseudo-variable "this" (or 'self' in Smalltalk) which refers to that object from which you got that function (a.k.a "method" in this case).
But definitely the ability to have editor-support for lookup of argument-types etc. is a great benefit too.
> It is executing that function in the context of the object from which you get it, by utilizing the pseudo-variable "this" (or 'self' in Smalltalk) which refers to that object from which you got that function (a.k.a "method" in this case).
Ignoring runtime polymorphism for the moment, there's nothing special about "this" or "self". It's just another function parameter. Consider how in Python it is actually explicitly declared as a parameter in the method declaration.
> there's nothing special about "this" or "self"
It is special in that when a method executes say in JavaScript, the 'this' has a very specific value even though you did not pass in an argument of that name nor did you ever assign a value to a local variable of that name. Depending on the language you use trying to assign to the (pseudo-) variable 'this' may or may not cause an error.
The "automatic" value 'this' has makes it special, different from other variables and arguments. That automatic value ties the method-call-syntax into the semantics of what it means to call a method as opposed to calling a free function.
This can be exemplified in JavaScript easily:
let funk = myOb.funk;
let v = myOb.funk();
let v2 = funk(); // throws error
When you call myOb.funk() there is NO error in the same case, because 'this' is then NOT undefined, its value is 'myOb'.
You can access any field of myOb inside the code of myOb.funk when you call it as myOb.funk().
That is a big semantic difference, not just "syntactic sugar".
That is not necessarily the case though, for instance in Self (the language) `self` is the parent slot of the method activation object which contains the instance to which the message resolved. Then again there's no to functions as I don't think Self has free functions.
Also lots of languages have syntactic sugar around the corresponding object e.g. implicitly dereference it for attribute access and method calls, or even give it exclusive(ish) properties like @ in Ruby (or straight up instance variable access in smalltalk).
Even Python treats it specially, given a method `foo`, `obj.foo` actually returns a proxy object which partially applies `foo` to `obj`. This only works on functions defined on the class object, mere callables set on the instance don't get that treatment.
In python you get more than just a self - you get easier access to the inheritance hierarchy - super() is actually a compiler supported language feature (the compiler secretly inserts the parent class intro the parens).
> Method-syntax is more than syntactic sugar.
No, method syntax is just syntax. In some languages methods are more than just syntax sugar, but there's nothing special about the syntax itself.
Syntax has no meaning unless it is associated with some semantics, like it is in all programming languages.
Editor suggestions are good enough when you know what you’re looking for or can guess where the method you’re looking for will be and what it will be called. You very much still need to RTFM if you don’t have neither
So let's say I'm using some new SDK. I run a method that returns a Service object. In my current Go/Python world, I can dot-autocomplete to quickly get an idea of what procedures I can perform with this object. 90% of the time, this is sufficient to proceed. 10% of the time I need to RTFM/SO.
Ooh, hadn't seen @disable before, super useful to know! That'll be handy for doing toggleable build options for tracing / debugging.
I've been using Odin for about a year now, many of the pain-points I've had have just been knowledge gaps. Odin's docs and debug info have slowly gotten better over time, and little discord-community tips here and there have made a huge difference for my quality of life.
I was curious after reading: can the @disable behavior be modified at runtime? For long running programs I find it helpful to be able to set a certain log level up front but have a way to update it without rebuilding or restarting the program. There may be other operations that can’t immediately be shut down and restarted so requiring a rebuild or restart to get debug logs is not an option in those cases.
It cannot, it's purely a build-time feature. The disabled proc isn't even in the binary if you disassemble it.
Also for the record I just noticed I wrote @disable everywhere instead of @disabled. That's been fixed now
@disabled is neat. C# has long had the same feature: the [Conditional] attribute.
Odin is lovely and a great fit for graphics and games programming. I’ve been doing my real time graphics research in it (the CPU parts at least).
Shaving the yak: I find `$FNAME.test.odin` to be a bit nicer than `$FNAME_test.odin`.
I'm confused about this caller_location thing in tests. It looks like you're just passing `loc = loc` a bunch of times for no good reason. Why can't the language automatically or implicitly implement that functionality? Having to write `loc = loc` at the end of every assertion just seems silly.
Without it, it would pass the current location, that is the location inside that test function, rather than the original parent call.
Sure, I'm saying the language could aspire to implement full stack traces automatically for tests, rather than requiring passing it for all assertions. Having to keep writing the same thing over and over is just boilerplate and a distraction. There's no reason the language itself couldn't implement some built-in support for such functionality along with the testing module, given that they control the full ecosystem.
Interesting language... Any word on what they plan for concurrency?
How does one compile a language to other architectures which are not “officially” supported? It should be doable since it uses LLVM? Example, ESP32 SoC.
How many names (or substrings of names) of programming languages (other than Odin) can people see in the title of this current HN post? :)
I can't imagine someone named their language "of", "programming", or "in". So, I guess 3. Joy and Odin are obvious since they have shown up here recently.
Totally tangential, but am I the only one that was taught to put punctuation inside of quotes and now despises that rule?
If you're referring to the period at the end of the sentence, I don't like that rule either.
Seems more natural to have the period after the closing quote, at least in cases like this sentence of yours from above:
>I can't imagine someone named their language "of", "programming", or "in".
But I think there may be cases where period inside and before closing quote may seem better, e.g. if quoting what someone said, like a quoted sentence inside another sentence.
But I'm not an English grammar expert.
It was kind of a trick question.
4: Small(talk), Joy, Pro(log) and D (from Odin).
>Joy and Odin are obvious
I had explicitly excluded Odin above. :)
I'll wait another 12 or so hours to see if anyone else than gcoakes replies, before replying myself.
Is it just me or does it look a lot like Go?
They both lack semi colons and parens around conditionals, but in terms of syntax its near identical to Jai.
Yeah part of it gives the same vibes
Warning: this is not a blog post about all the enjoyable activities you can partake in the company of a norse deity
Gota keep an eye out for that kind of thing
Acording to this series, it is a mixed experience.
Season 1 was good. Season 2...not so much.
Bummer. Those are the best parties, even if you have to die in battle to get there.