For me, I don't really look at Odin as a successor/fixer of C. There are other languages that can make a better case for that[1][2]. Instead, I look at it more like a successor/fixer of Pascal. It doesn't fall down the OO hole that so many others did. It has type casting, dynamic arrays, parametric polymorphism in both functions and data structures, is much less noisy (and in my opinion far more skimmable), more useful built-in primitive data structures like associative arrays and matrices, custom allocators, function overloading, reflection, etc.
You can find odds and ends of these things in other Pascal successors like Delphi, Oberon and Object Pascal. Truth is though, I never found these languages compelling. Why? Because none of them were anywhere close to being the same kind of simplicity as Pascal, and they were too wrapped up in flashy, trendy things that went out of style. Where Odin wins out is that it distinctly lacks the 90's OO craze hangover, and it never feels particularly more complicated or bloated. It's an audaciously tasteful proposition for a language. A C replacement? No, not really. But as a C++ programmer who's fed up with the lack of things like structure introspection and ergonomic sum types, I'm keeping a very close eye on Odin.
[1] - https://c3-lang.org/
[2] - https://harelang.org/
I've been using Odin for the last ~6 months, wrote a 15k loc project and it's been an absolute pleasure. This is my first low level language after 10 years of web dev, and it feels much higher level than it is, while giving you the control and performance of a language like C.
I like pretty much every choice that has been taken when designing the language, except maybe the lack of namespaces, which can be solved anyway with prefixes.
The lack of OOP features is the best part for me, it's rewiring my brain in a good way and I can now also reason much better about RDBMS schemas. Data oriented design is the most helpful approach I've stumbled upon in my career.
Odin really hits the sweet spot for everything you would want from a language for the game dev and game-dev-adjacent space in terms of simplicity, convenience, and speed. I think a major design decision of the language that will make or break it for users is the fact that the language gives you common features instead of giving you the means of abstraction to make those features yourself. For example, instead of preprocessor macros you get the `when` clause for conditional compilation because in Bill's estimation, that's one of the only real needs for macros. The same goes for data structures. Odin gives you the certified classics like dynamic arrays and maps but doesn't give you a whole lot to make your own custom data structures (it's possible, just not encouraged by the language design). All in all, I think if you want to make an application with a language that has batteries included and you don't need a lot more than that, Odin is nearly flawless.
> but doesn't give you a whole lot to make your own custom data structures
For anyone unfamiliar with Odin that might misinterpret this, Odin has structs and parametric polymorphism for those structs. What it does not have is operator overloading or methods (which also means no constructors or destructors). In this sense, its product types are like ocaml's, only without methods too. Odin is not object oriented.
Odin truly feels like a C successor, and as someone who likes Go, it appeals to me a lot more than Zig or Rust. Partly because it took inspiration from the Pascal, Delphi, Oberon branch, same as Go.
I don’t particularly enjoy working on the types of problems Zig or Rust aim to solve. I spend the majority of my time working at layer 4, and Go makes it immensely enjoyable. But sometimes I want a bit more control over the hardware and don’t want to pay the cost of a GC. Odin feels just right.
In my case, the assortment of syntactic features like OOP, compile-time macros, or even the borrow checker suck all the fun out of programming. That’s why I still enjoy writing C programs, footguns and all.
When I first saw Odin, I wrote down a list of everything I didn't think I'd like.
After several thousand lines, it proved all of my major worries incorrect, and has been an absolute pleasure.
It has since replaced my usage of Go, which I had been using since release.
I would highly recommend giving it a proper shot!
I'm kinda curious, you mind sharing some of the things you thought you didn't like?
FWIW, another take on "C Alternative" is the D programming language:
https://wiki.dlang.org/Tutorials
Comparatively mature, there's even a freeware book which is quite good:
Walter Bright, the creator of D, is an active commenter here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=WalterBright
Zig is also worth mentioning, and pops up frequently.
Once, on a previous account, he actually replied to me. It's like a kid going to guitar center and the guy who replaces your strings is Axl Rose.
If you're on here, Walter, you're my hero. I also once interacted with Brendan Eich, who I admire as much for his role in web history as for his activism.
> his activism
Do you mean his homophobia?
I always thought it was more akin to a C++ than a C alternative, and reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language) seems to rather confirm this notion:
"originated as a re-engineering of C++"
"influenced by Java, Python, Ruby, C#, and Eiffel"
"design by contract, ranges, built-in container iteration concepts, and type inference"
"array slicing, nested functions and lazy evaluation."
"Java-style single inheritance with interfaces and mixins"
"function overloading and operator overloading"
"supports five main programming paradigms" (including OOP)
... et cetera
D was never a C alternative, it was a C++ alternative.
It certainly is, also known as D as C or Das C.
^ and this person (no affiliation) has a much "truer" C alternative in the making, just for everyone's information: https://c3-lang.org/
Haven't gotten around to trying it out, but skimmed the documents a lot at one point. Always try to keep tabs on it, doesn't get the love it should.
Depends on the point of view, especially those of us that think there is no reason for C other than legacy code, since C++ exists.
By the way, code that I wrote yesterday is legacy.
Doesn't having a whole subset of the language called "Better C" qualify?
It was introduced in 2017, and not part of the original direction of D (it’s neither in 1.0 nor the 2.0 revision of the language)
That D exposes a curated subset of D doesn’t make it a C alternative, even though the ”betterC” aims to target people looking for a C alternative
C is liked particularly, even considering all its shortcomings, for being a relatively limited language in scope, being raw but flexible.
D's scope seems to go far beyond what your average C programmer would want in a language; "use only 15% of the language and you'll be fine" (paraphrasing: "use only the 'better-C' subset", if that is what you meant, and it does seem to be a subset of D) seems a weird proposition; it still complicates things, as in collaboration, idiomatic feel and look of code, the amount of knowledge required to be competent in the language, complexity of a compiler implementation, portability of code etc... and by that logic you'd have to prefer C++ over C as well (since a lot of C is valid C++), or prefer C plus one safety feature added over C; but the "rawness"/limited scope/small size/procedural nature of C is what's appealing for many to begin with.
I for one think that a proper C replacement (C's strength also being the simplicity in which to implement a compiler for example, being the reason it's so ubiquitous in the embedded world) will be a much more limited proposition than D is.
Edit: And having been curious, even "Better-C" still has things many C-programmers wouldn't particularly like. Going by things listed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language)
RAII
Full metaprogramming
Nested functions, nested structs, delegates and lambdas
Member functions, constructors, destructors, operating overloading, etc.
...
Viewing it as a C++ alternative makes much more sense. A `Better-C` "limit yourself to a subset of the language" compiler flag doesn't change that much.
I wouldn't like RAII, and why I didn't add it to Odin. It's not a feature C programmers want. And you've just agreed that C don't want ctors/dtors, which is necessary for RAII to work... ctors/dtors are bad for their own reasons (mainly because you cannot handle error cases except through exceptions, which many people disable too).
Do you realize that D has betterC and now it also supports C compilation natively? [1] [2]
[1] D as a C Replacement (187 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323114
[2] Adding ANSI C11 C compiler to D so it can import and compile C files directly (105 comments):
Yes, I am quite aware. But it doesn’t make D any less a C++ alternative.
If you aim to be both a C alternative and C++ alternative, in reality you are just a C++ alternative because you haven't understood why people prefer C over C++. Therefore D is a C++ alternative and that's what it was always trying to be, even with "BetterC".
I've started experimenting with Odin for some personal projects and it's been great. The built-in vendored libraries make creating certain programs trivial. For example, just `import rl "vendor:raylib"` and you can use `rl.InitWindow(800,600,"Test")`. No need to install Raylib, add to path or use special linker directives, just `odin build .`!
Also I think Odin struck the right balance of features while trying to keep to the spirit of C.
As a completely incidental observation (and maybe related to the article from a few days ago considering the importance of language skills compared to math skills for software development), I'm interested in what people choose to capitalize when developing languages. With c, lowercase seems to be the default, signifying variables or function calls. Adding inheritance in c++ leads to Proper Nouns like classes being capitalized, while their instances are often lowercase. This communicates a subtle "feel" for the language, meta information about what's being accomplished.
Capitalizing method calls (`rl.InitWindow()`) seems to place the importance on the Method being called, but at first glance (ASP, or Go off the top of my head) it muddies the waters. If this isn't clear, consider that capitalizing ALL code would reduce clarity as all letter shapes are now essentially the same (a box).
I spend most of my time in c, c++, ruby, and javascript, but maybe I should try to do a personal project in Go (or Odin) for this reason alone.
I believe most of this is language designers picking their personal preference and then that percolating down through history.
The original UNIX folks really love lowercase. Executables are lowercase, most file names are lowercase, file extensions are, etc. That extends to C where DMR and Ken Thompson chose lowercase names for keywords, built-in types, and standard library functions. If I remember right, Thompson uses all lowercase in most of his communications too, so I suspect it comes from him. Or maybe it was a flex because the PDP-11 could do lowercase when some other early computers didn't support it at all?
The early Pascal compilers from Niklaus Wirth and friends appear to be all caps, probably because that's all the machines supported. The language itself generally isn't case sensitive. (I say "generally" because there are many flavors of Pascal.)
When Anders Hejlsberg created Turbo Pascal (which is also case-insensitve), he introduced a convention of lowercase for keywords what we now call PascalCase for function and type names and (judging by the Wikipedia article) a mixture of PascalCase and camelCase for variables.
Perhaps because Straustrup built on C but is a Dane like Hejlsberg, he picked a mix for C++: camelCase function and variable names with PascalCase type names.
These conventions then flowed down through time. Java was heavily inspired by C++ and takes the same convention. C# is another Hejlsberg creation and follows his preferences. JavaScript follows Java. (It must annoy Hejlsberg to no end that his third baby TypeScript breaks with his own convention.)
Odin itself does not care what naming conventions you use. Use whatever you prefer.
For Odin native libraries, we usually for the convention of `snake_case` for variables and procedures and `Ada_Case` for types. However for anything that is third-party/foreign, we try to keep to the same convention as the original library to make it easier to people reference the original documentation, as well as not have any of the problems that certain naming conventions cannot be translated to another. So the raylib code uses the original raylib naming conventions because of the reasons I described.
Sticking to an library style is a way to go. It's so much friction to use python library wrappers which try to hammer original style into a snake_case.
In this case, I believe the capitalization is a hold-over from raylib's c library, Odin doesn't appear to put any preference?
In Go it has a specific meaning: starting an identifier with a capital causes it to be exported for use in other packages. Identifiers with a starting lowercase char are package private.
Apologies if this is explaining what you already know...
That's a method from Raylib, a C library which has Odin bindings. For all libraries, Odin follows the original library's style.
The Odin convention is Pascal case (lower_case_procedures, Capitalized_Enums_And_Structs).
It's technically `Ada_Case` that we use, because I like reading it.
I don't understand the point of this. When I say "Go flavour" I thought it would have lightweight threads like Go, but there is no mention of that in the description page. So it's another uninteresting curly brace language as far as I can tell. I'd rather use one with more traction.
"go flavour" refers to the similarity in the design philosophy, and some of the features. That said, it's still not Go.
For example, "errors as values" is a point that Odin makes, but it does make it in a slightly different light from Go. Whereas Go has an `error` type that encompasses all errors, Odin does not. Instead, it treats some types (booleans, enums, unions) as "special", in that they support things like `or_return`, which are typically your error propagation statements. Oh yeah, `or_return` is another big point, it does simplify a lot of `if err != nil { return err }` type of code.
And another big similarity to Go is the declaration syntax. It was inspired by one of Rob Pike's (iirc) comments on twitter about how they should have used a different syntax for Go instead.
From personal experience though, there are some things in Odin that I wish Go had. Its features play along together so nice, and it's so satisfying having three different language features come together in a nice logically-coherent simple way. That said, I don't think Odin is capable of replacing Go. Things like server-side logic and lightweight threads are probably where Go still excels at and beats Odin.
For systems-level programming I'd pick Odin though.
Odin seems to strike a really interesting balance between simplicity and practicality, especially for game development. I like the idea of having “batteries included” without too much abstraction getting in the way. For those who have used both Odin and Go, how do you feel about the differences in day-to-day development? Are there any features in Odin that you wish Go had, or vice versa? Would love to hear more real-world experiences!
I mean, the biggest difference is that Go has a GC and Odin doesn't. And each's ecosystem reflects that... In practice they're simply not used for the same types of software.
Can someone explain how Odin achieves memory safety? Eg how does it avoid use-after-free?
It's not. However it is safer than C by default due to things like bounds-checking on arrays, slices (ptr+len), tagged unions, distinct typing for many things, an actual enum type, numerous checks for things like missing switch cases, and my more.
It's not trying to be memory safe, but rather try and catch many common mistakes that C does not catch easily.
As for use-after-free, I'd argue that is more of a problem with the memory allocation strategy in a language like C or Odin. And a change to something like an Arena like memory allocation strategy or something else reduces issues like that by a hell of a lot. `malloc`/`free` like approaches to memory allocation make use-after-free a lot more common because it making you micromanage allocations on a per-value level rather than on a per-shared-lifetime level. It's rare a single value has a unique lifetime, and I'd argue never in many projects.
Yeah, it's not safety as an absolute term, more like "safer than C". Which, to be honest, anything with bounds checking is safer than C.
It does bounds checking for you but there's not memory safety feature a-la Rust. That's not the point of Odin anyway.
It doesn’t.
been playing around with odin and honestly the ease of getting started feels way better for me than most c-like stuff ever has. you ever think these smaller pain points keep more folks from switching than big technical features?
I am currently limiting myself to 500 lines of (particle engine) code while listening to visual artists talking about their workflow in UE5 or Houdini, and Odin+Raylib are lovely to work in.
GingerBill has shouted out Go, but Odin doesn't particularly feel like a Go flavo(u)r.
To point out something that is a fail: I don't want to hear about how you simulated 10M particles on the GPU without acceleration forces.
Well at JangaFX, we can simulate a heck more than that on the GPU and you can apply as many complex forces applied to them as you'd like.
> This is the polar opposite of Zig’s embracing of metaprogramming for as much as possible.
I found this claim a bit strange. do people actually use metaprogramming in Zig a lot?
IMO it's one of Zig's advantages over C (text substitution macros are both too powerful and not powerful enough). If you're using Zig without metaprogramming, you're leaving a useful (if advanced) tool on the table.
C's preprocessor not being powerful enough is less a problem with text-substitution macros, more that they're not allowed to expand recursively which was an intentional design choice. There are some hacks you can do to get around it, and people have done cool things[1] within the limited space those hacks grant you, but there's a reason many C projects with extensive metaprogramming just use an external macro language (which is also just text-substitution).
IMO AST Macros are an even bigger problem than text substitution. Debugging metaprogramming of any kind past a certain point of complexity is a royal pain in the ass (even in a Lisp, Forth or Prolog), but AST explorers are next to useless for complicated logic problems that involve needle in a haystack searches of side effects. If you're dealing with a large AoS of heterogeneous SoAs which influence each other to shuffle around, and most of the related code and the structures themselves are generated via AST macros, you better be really comfortable with assembly analysis and debugger scripting.
Debugging complex Lisp metaprogramming is a piece of cake in the overall debugging landscape.
- It is not distributed across machines. No distributed fault tolerance issues.
- It doesn't run on a resource constrained embedded system, with poor visibility, but in your dev environment.
- It runs in a single thread; no flaky race conditions or deadlocks to debug.
- Its expansion-time performance rarely matters; and it is rarely bogged down with machine dependencies or other low-level stuff.
- It is unit-testable with cases does construct X expanding to construct Y.
I would rather debug a macro than any number of other things I've also debugged.
I can't comment about everyone, but I use it a lot for building libraries and such. I just recently built a database ORM, but since their metaprogramming is used for their generics I've run across it a lot just for those case.
Isn't all sorts of stuff metaprogramming in Zig? Generic types, vtable interfaces, printf. All use comptime to generate code.
i think "using comptime" as a definition of metaprogramming is not really accurate... for example, i think calling this metaprogramming is really stretching it:
var x: [sqrt(LENGTH)]f32 = undefined
same goes for "using std.debug.print"
Depends on the project, the general recommendation is to use metaprogramming like salt: just a pinch to add some flavor. Newcomers sometimes go bonkers with it though.
How does this compare with Zig or Beef?
I like odin a lot, however, there are two things that just don't stick with me, and i ended up quitting:
- RTTI: just give me compile time type introspection and let me disable RTTI without making the language unusable
- when/import: just let me wrap an import inside a when block, being forced to split my file in 3 made me quit the language
There is compile time type introspection in Odin, it's just not that easy to use on purpose. But why do you not want RTTI? One of the reasons I wanted it over CTTI is because it's a fixed cost rather than an exponential cost—at both compile-time and run-time.
People who want CTTI is because they think it will produce better code because it is specialized for that type, and that is partially true, but also it will produce a hell of a lot more code. The canonical example of what I mean is the difference between doing something like `core:fmt` in Odin, which is a fixed cost at both compile-time and run-time, and then doing something closer to `std::format` in C++ (or other similar things in other languages) which will do a specialized procedure for each set of argument types. The former might be a huge initial cost if you only have a single type you want to print, but that cost is always the same regardless of many more types you add, it's also easier to debug. The latter is a small initial cost per type, and when the types get more and more complex, you also produce more and more code, which in turn increases the compiling time and binary/executable size.
As for the conditional imports, we did use to allow them but we found that what people were doing with them was kind of missing the point of the platform-specific features of the `package` system, and their code was always better if it actually utilized the package system correctly. There were some other quirks with the conditional imports which did confuse people because they didn't realize how things had to be executed (to allow for out-of-order type checking) and just disallowing it in the first place just solves that too (as a consequence, not as a goal).
Can't comment on RTTI, but lack of conditional imports are indeed an annoyance but I'm willing to put up with it because of all the other niceties in the language.
I remember times before Odin banned conditional imports. Those were different times, I miss them
re Odin -- I do not like reusing important names in this way. Can I be the only one?
What do you mean exactly?
A C alternative means a language that will last for 50 years, whereas this seems more like "whatever's popular by way of LLVM". I can see some real smart stuff coming out of languages like Zig and Rust, where Odin seems just to follow along.
Seems needlessly harsh and also misplaced in some way. Zig is super non-ergonomic to any C-developer, and its explicitness at all costs is also non-C-like (meaning a rather big shift for someone actually liking C). Rust is a completely different beast altogether.
Odin is a rather simple, performant, pragmatic, procedural language, fixing especially things in C with regards to its type system and infrastructure (such as packages), adding niceties such as `defer` while being at it. I, as a C programmer, have it far higher up my list of languages to try than Zig or Rust by a rather large margin.
btw: "C alternative means a language that will last for 50 years" seems a snide that could be applied to any language less than 20 years old? I'm not sure what that's concretely meant to criticize here? Is Zig more a 50-year language than Odin, if so how? Odin is used for rather serious commercial products at JangaFX btw: https://jangafx.com/ and is quite beloved by some people using it.
Does Modula-2 count?
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.1.0/gm2/
Or Ada,
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.1.0/gnat_ugn
Maybe C++, given that the three main C compilers are written in it?
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/the-great-c-runtime-c...
https://petereisentraut.blogspot.com/2013/05/moving-to-c.htm...
Thank you for the kind words regarding Odin! So Odin is in the family of Pascal _but_ I've tried my best to design it in such a way that it does "fix" most of the problems of C (since I am/was a C programmer), and make it _feel_ good to a C programmer when programming in the language.
My view is that the core of Pascal was actually the correct place to start rather than the core of C. C won out of Pascal purely because the original Pascal didn't fix its problems quick enough, and all of the successors also tried to focus on other fancier things like OOP or GC or whatever. C still remained "basic" and its preprocessor allowed for enough extensions for lacking language features, whilst not adding any of those fancier things.
For Odin, I tried to take the lessons of what I and others were emulating in C and just make them core constructs. Odin initially didn't have many of the constructs it has now such as parametric polymorphism or explicit procedure overloading, but all of them came about as a result of solving the problems people used the preprocessor for or other new features. For example, the explicit procedure overloading came about seeing how people use the (relatively new) C11 `_Generic` feature, and realizing that they were trying to emulate this aspect pretty much.
Odin also took a lot of the GNU C extensions and incorporated them directly (some of which are not in the latest version of C): `0b` literals, nested procedures (but not scope capturing), `type_of`, `case` ranges (`..<` and `..=` in Odin to be more explicit about the range bounds), array initializes with ranges, unnamed structs/unions, empty structs, and so much more.
Odin isn't a C++ alternative by any stretch, but I have seen a lot of C++ programmers really like it because it feels like it has just enough to make them feel at home whilst still have the control and more explicitness that C offers.
Where can I follow Odin's progress other than the blog? It doesn't seems to have any social media presence.
And what sort of time frame in terms of 1.0? I found Odin lacks the marketing push from Zig or Rust.
> Delphi, Oberon and Object Pascal [..] I never found these languages compelling. Why? Because none of them were anywhere close to being the same kind of simplicity as Pascal
Agree. Oberon comes close, but has other orthodoxies like upper-case keywords, and it lacks the low-level support of e.g. Delphi. I spent a lot of time with extending Oberon, but backward compatibility prohibited some features I thought were necessary. My forthcoming Micron language is this kind of "better Pascal" you mentioned; essentially it's an Oberon withouth orthodoxies and with the power of C (without its disadvantages); there are language levels from minimal, stack-less systems, up to dynamic dispatch and optional garbage collection. See https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron/.
Hard disagree the simplicity of Pascal, is what made it unusable outside the original goal to learn programming.
Instead we ended up with UCSD Pascal, Object Pascal, TMT Pascal, Quick Pascal, VMS Pascal, Delphi and what not.
By the time it came to be, ISO Extended Pascal was largely irrelevant, outside some UNIX compilers that supported it.
The Borland linage, after taking over Apple's design, which had input from Niklaus Wirth, is my favourite, then their management messed up.
In an ideal world, Modula-2 or Ada would have taken over, sadly no big name OS vendor, ever felt like adopting them.
As for Oberon, when I came to learn it, Oberon-2 was already out, eventually Component Pascal and Active Oberon were much more interesting to me.
While I appreciate Niklaus Wirth work, I was never a fan of the minimalism he tried to pursue with Oberon-07. Then rather use Go.
In the end, nothing of this will matter in the age of AI assisted tooling and code generation.
Arguing what is the best language is getting akin to argue about Assembly language syntax, when most people are using optimizating compilers.
Did you take a look at Ada as replacement for Pascal ? With the 'gnat' compiler and some doc (https://www.adaic.org/learn/) I think you can find what you are looking for.
Isn't Go the modern successor of Pascal? It certainly didn't fall down the OO hole.
I think Nim is much more of a pascal successor than Go ; It retains some of the syntax and feel, although it uses Python style indentation instead of begin/end.
It is by no means pascal-simple - although the subset used by 95% of programs is.
It does have everything you need including macros, unsafe access, minimal OO but these are almost exclusively used by library developers.
First it needs to catch up to some Pascal features like real enumerated types, no iota/const dance.