The Odin Programming Language

Odin seems rather similar to Zig: https://ziglang.org/ It would be interesting to hear from anyone who has spent time in both about the differences in experience. It’s a trend of “Better C than C” languages that don’t go as far as Rust or C++ in terms of either complexity (or safety) but are more opinionated and modern than C. I think Nim can squeeze into this category, too, but maybe not? Nim is confusing to me. Jon Blow is also…

I think Odin is the best language in this niche so far. And although I prefer it slightly to Zig, I expect Zig to eat Odin's lunch. Odin seems to have procrastinated the important things that cause a language to really take off, in favor more trivial features. At this point I think Odin has crossed into the territory of being wrong in the direction of too many features rather than too few. While having not delivered important tools that…

Odin seems like a bunch of features copied from a bunch of different languages without making sure they're (a) good and (b) consistent. Things like ranges being `1..5` in one context but `1:5` in another, or having range-based iteration but still having classic for loops which ranges almost completely obsolete, or functions that may or may not allocate without having automatic deallocation. `or_return` is a significant improvement on Go's error system, but why not add an actual error system while…

I've been following Bill's work on Odin for years now and he has really accomplished a lot. I personally haven't had a use case for it yet but people whose opinions I trust have all had pleasant experiences with it, and it's already being used as a tooling language in at least one production project. So if you are interested in new languages, and especially "low concept" systems languages, I can heartily endorse this project.