Is Odin "Programming done right"? (with Bill Hall) 

For me too. ❤️

Thanks for tge heads up. Great interview.

I first heard of you on Primeagen's channel. I could listen to you talk about Odin all day long. Good stuff.

I just watched an interview with you today, this feels weird.

My thoughts exactly, plus decent windows support which go struggles with a bit, very interesting language.

Will there be an "Are we X yet?" moment for Odin as was for Rust?

It's an interesting starting point because in one sense there's a product driving development and the features needed to make that product are in the language.

I've used Odin for a week or two, and Go for many years. So far, it does feel like a mix of Go and maybe something like Zig (with regards to allocators being passed into functions.) A lot of Odin's standard library also seems similar in package structure to Go, which has made it easier for me to find things.

@@BboyKeny no. Odin lang community is not a cult. So most likely not.

Thanks! 😊

Good luck with that. What's the game name?

@@beloaded3736 Thank you. Game name is CAT & ONION. I'll post on this youtube account and on twitter when it's out. Steam page coming soonish. It'll be released on itch before Steam!

@@karl_zylinski Best of luck!!

Why would anyone develop a game engine in C, the only reasons to use C is if you don't have a C++ compiler available for the platform or you work with legacy code.

​@@beloaded3736 thank you! The game is called CAT & ONION. It's out on Steam now ✨

Yeah, I feel like the pitfall of a lot of languages is that they try to include everything, and stray away from their initial concept. For example, Rusts big (maybe biggest) sell is safety, but people often complain about the borrow checker, but if Rust made workarounds easier, it would destroy the point of the language. You should invent a language with a philosophy, python has issues with type checking, and speed, but it has really simple syntax that works well as an interface for libraries. If Python made itself a low level language with strict syntax, they would lose their purpose. There’s a billion general use languages that are all practically the same, when designing a language, it’s good to have a mindset like him and think what the language needs to achieve its purpose. It’s trying to be C v2, so making the same mistakes C++ made would be stupid and silly

I think as long as you have packages, that's all the namespacing you really need

Thank you so much for using it!

@@GingerGames waiting for the next ~ update.

@@GingerGames No, really, thank you! First language and way of thinking that clicked with me in a long time. Zig is in the same ball park but something about Odin just makes it more fun. May be the syntax or just the fact we have actual strings in the core lib instead of []u8 :p, or maybe just the fact that it's so focused on game dev...can't choose :D . Btw #soa, best thing ever

@@GingerGames Incredibly grateful for this language!

@@androth1502 what kind of "update"?

We need this.

I’d love to see this

Andreas Rumpf is the creator of Nim, sir - not Araq.

@@pookiepatsAraq is his username But you are right, I should've used a full name here.

If they formulate the two, Zigdin, Odig, Zod... Oz? 👊

Oooh, nice. I'll drop a line to Sophia and see if she's interested. Thanks!

You didn't have to wait long - it's up now. :-D

Ah, thanks for letting me know. ❤️ Fixed!

Thank you for watching the video. With regards to the "automagic C interop", this sounds cool until you realize this is actually pretty much NEVER what you want. In all of the cases you look at what Zig does, the libraries just wrap the automagically imported C calls, which is effectively the same amount of work as just writing the bindings manually, defeating the entire purpose of the automagical stuff. There is also the other issue that people use the C-preprocess as if it was the same language as C. They define constants and many wrapper functions and more, with the preprocessor, which will be missed by the "automagical" stuff. We are currently working on making an official automatic bindings generator, and because of Odin's amazing `foreign` system stuff, things can have little to no wrappers whatsoever, and still be extremely useful. Odin has tried its best to make binding with foreign code very pleasurable, whilst not requiring wrappers. See things like the attributes `link_prefix` or even `b32` types (for booleans which are not 1-byte) or `u32le` types (endian specific types) or multi-pointers `[^]T`. With a bindings generator, you'll have a lot more control about how you can interface with foreign (e.g. C) code.

@@GingerGames thank you for the wonderful reply!

Our pleasure!

It will generally beat out Go in performance, but not quite at the level of C, C++, Zig, etc in regards to its potential "raw power". It is probably most relatable to Rust in regards to potential performance. Obviously all of these languages being listed are "fast", so its in the ballpark, and the differences are moot unless you are developing for some AAA game title that is aiming to eek out the absolute most possible out of the hardware.

Do it! I'm making games in Odin and I've never been both so productive and creative at the same time.

We'd be interested in seeing if we can support a freestanding PowerPC platforms for Odin most definitely! Maybe some forms of Cortex-M (but it's too varied to be actually useful as a single generic target). As for MicroBlaze, you're probably the first person I've met in a long time to even use it still. Supporting these new platforms does take a bit work (LLVM isn't just magic, unfortunately) to get working, but we are not against supporting those platforms. We have just been focusing on the main application-oriented platforms (AMD64, ARM64, and now wasm), but that doesn't mean we cannot support other platforms.

As I say in the interview, try both of the languages out for at least a week each, and see which you prefer!

@@GingerGames Thank you, Bill, you're such a great inspiration 🫡

Yeah, that's a thorny one. We also go out as an audio-only podcast on Spotify, Apple, etc., so we have to treat it like radio...

While it gets compared to C quite a bit, it is far closer to Go than C, especially regarding syntax. I almost think of it as more complex version of Go, but using LLVM under the hood. I really like Odin, it is downright fun to code with, but IMHO it is not even close to being a "C/C++ replacement", I honestly don't even understand why they are so often compared to one another. It has some great strengths that make it stand out, even among other emerging lower-level languages like Zig, Rust, etc. and I feel it would be better off to not try and brand itself as a "C replacement" and lean harder into its strengths and the fields it excels in.

Odin does have freestanding targets, but it we are not focusing on embedded systems for loads of reasons. Personally I believe embedded systems (whatever that even means, since it is such a broad category), needs a language tailored for its domain. More domain specific languages is what we need, not "generalized" languages which is not great for any specific domain.

Nope. That's private. But Odin does have `vendor:microui` which you can use and modify to your heart's content.

@@GingerGames Hey thanks for the reply and I completely understand [keeping it private]!

That would be Pascal :(

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-tgxtk2OeLwM.html

It's not clear either of these languages will survive. People have been trying (unsuccessfully) to kill C and C++ for decades, and there has been a large number of new systems programming languages lately. Hare, Jai, Vale, Hylo, Austral to name a few. How many do we need and why would you pick one over the others?

@@Kuraitou So? Doesn't mean we should stop trying. C is a relic and while C++ has its nice parts, it's a pretty poor language from an objective perspective. It barley has any cohesive design and copied over all of C's pain points verbatim. I think Jonathan Blow put it quite well (and I don't usually find myself agreeing much with the guy). Roughly paraphrased "We aren't going to be programming in C or C++ for ever. The question isn't *if* another language is going to replace it, but *when*." And even leaving that besides the point, why do can't we have multiple low level systems programming languages? Rust, Zig, Odin, Jai, V, Hare... They can comfortably coexist. If Odin proves itself suitable for graphics, simulations and game programming, then why not adopt it for those tasks? Take a look at other domains. Backend development is a mix of C#, Java, Go, unfortunately a lot of JavaScript. High frequency trading sees a lot of languages in play, so does data science and virtually any other software domain. You'd be laughed out of the room, if you suggested any of those domains needs to settle for "one true language" or that we should stop trying to innovate within them, or that you don't need anything besides good old Java. Truth is, Systems programming has simply been under-served for a long time. I'd wager that's mostly down to how hard it was to write a good compiler and there not being major incentives for the M$, Googles and Oracles of the world to do so (hard to sell a platform for a language that doesn't need a platform), but LLVM, for all its shortcomings, has really changed the game here. Too some end, I think we are seeing a cambrian explosion in terms of low-level systems programming languages. Surely not all will find mass adoption and maybe not all of them will survive long term, but many will find their niches. Maybe that's why C/C++ folks get so defensive over the whole issue. They aren't used to having competition.

Odin is domain focused language while Zig is more general purposes. I don't see the competition. Zig tries to interop and actually replace C. Odin is just another specialized systems language.

@@Kuraitou have they tho ? I hear this all the time that people have been trying to replace C for decades but failed like it was impossible ? All those languages who ""tried"" to replace C where failing from the start. For example Jave could never be a C replacement yet in the early days it was advertised as such, On the other hand nowadays we have in my opinion real contenders, Zig for examples actually feels like a C replacement, as a C developer, Zig makes me feel at home, it's imperative, there is no inheritance, it's lower level than C. Everything feels better in Zig than in C, the type system feels better, the std is light years more useful, the semantic feels more cohesive, the error handling is better, testing code as never been easier, building it too, allocators as first class citizen is awesome, I could go on but all those things considered makes me feel like Zig could be an actual replacement to C, same with Rust, It feels a lot like Cpp, I hate Cpp, but Rust makes it more fun, it's still way too convoluted for my taste but It's a fantastic C++ replacement. So I think the argument of many have tried and they all failed isn't relevant anymore, because now that programming as a whole as evolved people have grown tired of C, myself included, it's a great language but the developer experience is really terrible and outdated, I see that everyday around me the programmers I work with all hate C in one way or another, and none of them use C in their spare time to build toy project, they all use Rust, Zig, Odin, Nim, OCaml and whatnot. I think the question is not about whether any of these languages will replace C, it's more of a when ? because it's pretty obvious that nobody in the industry wants a decade more of C, let alone another 50 years of it.

Odin does have bounds checking any many other memory safety features, just like Zig.

@@GingerGames insufficient in the modern world. Zig programs still can segfault. There are open PRs/bugs about memory corruption issues for tools written in zig ( I forget which one I was looking at ). The issue tracker mentioned the difficulty of tracking down the cause. I've yet to have a rust one crash. Affine/Linear types remove a whole class of memory errors.

@@GingerGames pascal has bounds checking for array access back in the 80s. It's old hat and barely suffices.

@@DanielJoyce so what are you referring to with regards to Zig in your original comment? Odin and Zig both use LLVM as their backend.

@@DanielJoyce Why is segfaults your primary concern? If you're rewriting a known or extremely critical program, I think it's understandable. But in my experience, writing software is a lot like exploration, and iteration speed matters a great deal. That's not Rust's strength at all. Compiler errors, just as well as runtime errors (e.g. crashes, boundary checks etc.) can be very useful with iteration speed. Crashes in production-ready code should be extremely rare even in "unsafe" C-like languages, when you zero-initialize and make default paths for zero values. And if you need to squeeze out performance, a borrow-checker (and most definitely a GC) will be in your way.

Firstly, name a single platform that supports 128-bit floating point numbers in hardware?---that isn't an FPGA. Secondly, if you need more precision than 64-bits, you probably want "big floats" instead, because 128-bits is probably not enough.

Yeah, I fretted over that one. I _think_ both are considered valid, and I figured if I pronounced it 'matrixes' then everyone-including non-native speakers-would know what I was referring to. Next time I think I'll just try to say it in a way that avoids the plural altogether. 😅

Well, it's easy to verify who created Odin, if you want to double-check. 🙂

That's my actual (legal) name. I am "Ginger Bill". My actual name is just so generic, which would make it nigh impossible to search for on the internet.

@@GingerGames Bill Hall is a great programming language designer name. It's right up there with Rob Pike.

You might be interested in Hare. Drew DeVault's writing that as a C replacement, and he's writing an OS too, to answer exactly your point. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-42y2Q9io3Xs.html

People have already written Kernels in Odin. So yes you can write an OS with Odin.

There are folks targeting ESP32 iirc. The matrix type in Odin is a stack allocated type, for most computer graphics applications its perfect. if you're going for big/sparse matrices still need a allocated type.

Update if anyone even bothers to read this, but I edited the source and deleted the bad option it was sending to clang and it built without errors. I'm assuming some configure script did it, but I'm not going to bother investigating further because no one cares.

I don’t want to speak for Bill, but I suspect he’d very broadly agree, and argue that that’s a good thing. As for me, I’m Switzerland. All ideas and perspectives considered. 😁

Poseidon would be a fantastic name for a language, if only because you could call it, "The King of the Cs." 😁

@@DeveloperVoices i like it 😂