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Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

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Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#21

Post by dismalaf »

leelou2 wrote: post #16

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-…

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.

Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#22

Post by bsrkf »

vandyswa wrote: post #10

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: http://www.ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html

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
Though it does support things like in-line assembly and the like, I'm sure most C programmers would pass on it, as a C-alternative, based on those factoids.

Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#23

Post by bsrkf »

James_K wrote: post #5

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.

Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#24

Post by lerno »

vandyswa wrote: post #10

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: http://www.ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html

D was never a C alternative, it was a C++ alternative.

Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#25

Post by lerno »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #4

> 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?

Isn't all sorts of stuff metaprogramming in Zig? Generic types, vtable interfaces, printf. All use comptime to generate code.

Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#26

Post by johnnyjeans »

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/

Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#27

Post by sdsd »

macintux wrote: post #18
vandyswa wrote: post #10

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: http://www.ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html

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.

Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#28

Post by rwbt »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#29

Post by bsrkf »

lerno wrote: post #24
vandyswa wrote: post #10

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: http://www.ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html

D was never a C alternative, it was a C++ alternative.

^ 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.

Re: Odin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour

#30

Post by Rochus »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #26

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 usef…

> 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/.

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