Understanding the Odin Programming Language

I've been using Odin for about 6 months now, and to be honest, it's hard to find fault with it. I've used it for STM32 microcontroller firmware, web and desktop applications, and all are performant and compile quickly.

My one issue is (and I'm fully aware it will never happen) I do wish there was some sort of first-class solution to inheritance. I've grown to love procedural programming, but some problems really are just better solved with a more OOP approach. Just because classes exist does not mean they need to be used.

But as far as a language to "get stuff done" with as few tradeoffs as possible, Odin is about as good as I can imagine a language being.

Having fun with this.

Never bought into rust (have studied, have a (mostly AI-generated app in rust).

Wrote some Zig but Odin is even less overhead for me. I first loved Zigs built-in build system but having tried to wrap/use C libraries from both, I must say I prefer Odin. Wrapping some sqlite 3 API’s for my first little Odin program - just because I need so little of the API that it seems easier this way - and speaking to C from Odin is a pleasure.

That is, imho, where Rust fails the most - the second part is the C++’ish approach to memory management (RAII) - that’s not how systems programming or games (I’m told) tend to work.

To each their own. I had some fun with Rust too, but for me, Odin seems the most appealing :)

I wonder if this will help them get a wikipedia page. (not sure whether this comment is a joke or serious...)

Kinda wanna know why I should learn this language. Unfortunately there’s no wiki entry (deleted with some controversy abut notability), so it’s hard to get the gist of it.

This was a pretty funny video for a language launch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLPAqXi9In0

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Like Go and Rust, the coolest thing (and maybe only cool thing) about this language is the name.

Now that LLMs are out of the bag, I expect to see a lot of new programming languages. In such an environment, one is better off promoting what you can do with it, rather than the language itself and its quirks.

Show me what you made with this language - it will help me better understand the use case(s) and trade-offs.

I say it because I see Odin following Rust in that it is relying a lot on its name in marketing. And on these microscopic language quirks that people don't really care about en masse, things people easily work around in other languages.

Doesn't seem very useful (sales-wise) to spend so much time talking about garbage collection or whether or not a language has native tuple support - and also the branding just doesn't matter that much. Go does a better job of this (what is Go's logo? Idk either. I know Swift's though. Go is 4x more popular - both "released" around the same time by similar companies).

JavaScript has the worst name of all time yet it's the most popular language because of how heavily relied upon it is by all kinds of consumer technology.

Python also - not a great name really, still wildly popular because of its use cases (and having a high quality library ecosystem).

Turbopack was a great example of when, why, where, to use a new, novel language (Rust) in an area I'd never consider it (web dev). It also opens my mind up to Rust doing other things like that in the ecosystem where I'd never consider it before. Now I kinda know what Rust is for.

This is maybe the best example I've found for Odin: https://odin-lang.org/showcase/solar_storm/

It opens up questions like "is it designed only for graphics and GUIs or is it more backend in general, is it low level systems or network" etc. then after that I'd ask whether or not it's strongly typed, compiled, and get into all those language quirks (which don't matter that much).

After seeing the game demo, I read that it wraps basically every major GL - more questions related to graphics programming but then the site keeps saying:

"The Data Oriented Language"

...on every page.

Up until now I had began to think it was a graphics oriented language, with all the GPU talk and game dev demos. But now it's a data language? And what does that even mean?

Then there's a book for sale that I keep running into. This isn't helping!

I love the name "Odin", and I like the idea of a new graphics-oriented programming language that somehow does something useful. Push me over the edge! Help me fall for this thing, it's so much like Rust in this way - seems amazing! But why? Why do I want this?

If it were me: I'd narrowly focus on 1 thing at first, something controversial and powerful - private MMO servers with good server-side physics and anti-cheat, or torrents, or running local AI models.

Build a beautiful IDE designed around your language ecosystem (that works for other languages too) and give it away for free. Optionally include a 7b LLM in the IDE to autocomplete Odin syntax to teach people the language. Get private servers for games like WoW and FF14 (illegal in most countries) online and teach people how to deploy their own. Tout the fact that no backend language in all of gaming can simulate physics to such a degree (fluid dynamics, etc.) and that no front-end language in gaming wraps all major GL providers so seamlessly in a single, easy-to-learn syntax.

Make the IDE icy af

I wonder when we'll see new languages created specifically with LLM's in mind.