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Understanding the Odin programming language

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Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#11

Post by moron4hire »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #5
pseudony wrote: post #3

Having fun with this. Never bought into rust (have studied, have a (mostly AI-generated app in rust). Wrote some Zig but Odin is even less overhead for me. I first loved Zigs built-in build system but having tried to wrap/use C libraries from both, I must say I prefer Odin. Wrapping some sqlite 3 API’s for my first little Odin program - just because I need so little of the API that it seems easier this way - and spea…

That is, imho, where Rust fails the most - the second part is the C++’ish approach to memory management (RAII) - that’s not how systems programming or games (I’m told) tend to work. What does this mean? Who told you that?

Yeah, that's weird. I first learned about RAII from professional game developers at gamedev.net.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#13

Post by datakan »

xqb64 wrote: post #12
datakan wrote: post #8

I wonder when we'll see new languages created specifically with LLM's in mind.

What would that look like?

I don't know but I would imagine there are a lot of inefficiencies in modern languages from an LLM perspective that it could strip out, reduce token costs, improve speed etc.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#14

Post by lioeters »

datakan wrote: post #8

I wonder when we'll see new languages created specifically with LLM's in mind.

I think it would be better to approach it from the other side, the priority is not to design a language for LLMs but a language more suitable for humans to think with. And not a natural language like English, which is inconsistent and allows illogical formulations, but something like Esperanto or Interlingua (Latino sine flexione). Something that is based on mathematics and logic at the bottom, like Lean, with enough abstraction layers for a person to be able to "speak" with the machine intuitively.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#15

Post by moron4hire »

xqb64 wrote: post #12
datakan wrote: post #8

I wonder when we'll see new languages created specifically with LLM's in mind.

What would that look like?

An LLM-only oriented language doesn't make sense, because without human generated training data there is nothing for the model to learn from.

But if a human-oriented language were to be designed to also be better for LLMs, I think it would involve deeply expressive syntax that can succinctly but distinctly represent a very broad set of common operations. Succinct so context can be managed well, distinct so completions don't confuse one thing for another, broad so as much "reasoning" can be taken away from the LLM as possible. An anti-C. A new take on the goals of Java and Go to be languages that protect the application from the Junior Developers You're Likely To Hire.

I somewhat think it would also involve application state images ala Smalltalk. LLMs seem okay at generating small deltas. Many deltas sequenced together invites compounding error. LLM generated apps are unlikely to lead to common libraries being compentized and extracted out of the application to share with other applications; it seems like LLM code generation is already a "married to a specific project" act already. So, having a living state image might reveal some benefits by leaning into incrementally developing the application in situ, as a whole.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#16

Post by frizlab »

pseudony wrote: post #3

Having fun with this. Never bought into rust (have studied, have a (mostly AI-generated app in rust). Wrote some Zig but Odin is even less overhead for me. I first loved Zigs built-in build system but having tried to wrap/use C libraries from both, I must say I prefer Odin. Wrapping some sqlite 3 API’s for my first little Odin program - just because I need so little of the API that it seems easier this way - and spea…

Did you try Swift? Its interoperability with C (and even C++) is great IMHO.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#17

Post by pseudony »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #5
pseudony wrote: post #3

Having fun with this. Never bought into rust (have studied, have a (mostly AI-generated app in rust). Wrote some Zig but Odin is even less overhead for me. I first loved Zigs built-in build system but having tried to wrap/use C libraries from both, I must say I prefer Odin. Wrapping some sqlite 3 API’s for my first little Odin program - just because I need so little of the API that it seems easier this way - and spea…

That is, imho, where Rust fails the most - the second part is the C++’ish approach to memory management (RAII) - that’s not how systems programming or games (I’m told) tend to work. What does this mean? Who told you that?

Games ? Many have talked about it, but many also make their games work inside of Unity and so on, so, depends on the project.

My angle is systems programming, and there, it absolutely matter. If you are performance sensitive, then you try to avoid crossing the user-space -> kernel boundary more than you have to.

Eg, ask for lots of memory, manage with arenas.

Interestingly Odin and Zig both lean into this heavily. Rust went a different route but has tried later to bolt on pluggable allocators.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#19

Post by mpweiher »

pclowes wrote: post #10
yesfinally wrote: post #7

[flagged]

Interesting, I am thinking/expecting we will see a massive decrease in new languages. Or people might make new languages but the will not get any adoption. A new language now has to clear the ever growing hurdle of not being in the LLM training data. Unless the language provides an absolutely incredible technical or runtime advantage over every other language that LLMs “speak” well I think it will really struggle to…

> A new language now has to clear the ever growing hurdle of not being in the LLM training data.

I found this to be far less of a prblen than I thought it would be.

Do you have practical experience?

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#20

Post by pdpi »

dustbunny wrote: post #9
CyberDildonics wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, imho, where Rust fails the most - the second part is the C++’ish approach to memory management (RAII) - that’s not how systems programming or games (I’m told) tend to work. What does this mean? Who told you that?

Casey Muratori and Jon Blow have pushed this concept frequently. They largely don't deeply elaborate, which is sad because I am a professional game developer who is interested in precisely presented knowledge so I can apply it to my work. My interpretation is that games want to allocate large pools of resources, like GPU buffers, cpu memory, etc, and reuse that memory over and over. Ie: Reinitialize it. In my experie…

Casey Muratori and Jon Blow are both hyper-dogmatic "my way or the highway" types, and, crucially, neither of them has built any of the super high fidelity types of game that would require that level of optimisation. They're basically influencer types.
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