A programming language made for me
44 points by gingerBill
44 points by gingerBill
I feel the same way about Odin that I do about Zig: envious of some features, but no way will I take a step backwards on (temporal) memory safety. That’s table stakes, now.
Same, which is why I wish Rust had a better story for some of the things that make Odin and Zig and friends so appealing. That is to say; they’re both small languages with rich orthogonal features born from the lessons of C and C++.
Meanwhile features like custom allocators, keyword generics, coroutines / generators, and doing something about the macro ecosystem’s insanity, etc. are all slowly but surely being stabilised. Sadly, the end result is a language that’s so damn big! (inb4 “we use this subset of features here in this C++ Rust project”)
I can’t help but feel that, with the benefit of hindsight, we could have had it all in a smaller language.
I just finished Karl’s book, it is comprehensive, well written, and easy to read. I recommend it, specially if Odin’s overview is too dense.
Never used Odin but was aware of it for a while. For me, the most interesting feature is probably its “implicit context,” “distinct type,” and builtin support for swizzling.
Odin and its tagged unions is my favorite thing. Iterating over different types of things like enemies and item pickups in games got very easy with that.
I don’t mean to party poop but these are so fundamental I barely even think of most of them as features, bar maybe SOA (and I guess allocator objects aren’t too common). Give me something juicy! Though since there’s no link to the main Odin website[1] for me to find out for myself, is this just an ad for a book?
[1] Ignoring the one to API docs and the one citing the source for a code example.
<p>While working there, I <a href="https://odin-lang.org">stumbled upon Odin</a>.
:-)