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Understanding the Odin programming language

odinbook.com

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Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#61

Post by gf000 »

sarchertech wrote: post #40
pdpi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Casey worked on tooling for AAA games that most certainly needed “that level” of optimization. Jon Blow worked on numerous AAA games that required “that level” of optimization. And he’s one of the very few developers in the last 15 years who have managed to sell more than a million copies of a game running on a scratch built 3D engine. You can disagree with their opinions, but they certainly have the experience to ba…

Well, Minecraft sold far more and it's a scratch built 3d engine isn't it? Popularity is certainly not a technical achievement.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#62

Post by frizlab »

leecommamichael wrote: post #52
hollowturtle wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's GC

Pedantically I’ll say it’s reference counted, and someone else will say that’s still a form of GC and I’ll just save us the mini-thread. Reference counting has deterministic timing, you can run a deconstructor without registering objects for deletion and running any known finalizers (what you need to do in all GC langs I’m aware of.)

Yes, but only classes are GC (refcounted as parent comment says, indeed). structs and other elements are not.

You can even use the same ownership model as rust (borrowing et al.) with non copyable types.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#63

Post by kulkalkul »

ant6n wrote: post #56

Kinda wanna know why I should learn this language. Unfortunately there’s no wiki entry (deleted with some controversy abut notability), so it’s hard to get the gist of it.

Odin overview is great resource for getting a quick gist (and learning the language as a bonus): https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/

But mainly, language doesn't have a special gimmick. The main idea (imo) is it is opinionated to have defaults to cater for majority of the cases. So once you get used to it, it is pleasure to write C-like code in it.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#64

Post by fatty_patty89 »

RetroTechie wrote: post #55
andyfilms1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odin is not like JS or something where you'd need a VM or transpilation process to target an embedded system. It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures, there's no "squeezing" required. You just compile for the target you want to run on. Here's a UI framework, if you scroll down you'll see it on a Raspi Pico: https://github.com/MadlyFX/Ansuz

I think you missed "native development". I'll rephrase: Could a toolset to develop in Odin be made to run on (not just target) an STM32 microcontroller like you used? > It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures That suggests the above would (in theory) be possible for any device that's roughly in the same class as "can run a C compiler". Correct?

> It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures

it's not, it's llvm

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#65

Post by dismalaf »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #58
dismalaf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate C++? They both use(d) it...

I didn't say they don't know it.

As opposed to using C, Rust, or something else (Jon eventually made Jai but Casey still uses C++). Obviously they don't outright hate it.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#66

Post by christophilus »

sarchertech wrote: post #49
christophilus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be interested in reading about your experience building web applications with it. Last I looked, its stdlib didn’t have great support for that.

There’s an official http package coming out and native tls support as well.

Yeah, but OP has built web applications without those. So, I wonder how they went about it.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#67

Post by indy »

andrepd wrote: post #25
dustbunny wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have pushed this concept frequently Ah... The school of what I like to call "maximum opinions and minimal evidence". Aggressive arrogant dismissal of anything except their exact view (and for Muratori, you're also "woke" for good measure), coupled with a complete lack of _hard evidence_ to back up their views. In that regard, they're not unlike "investment advice" instagram influencers.

"coupled with a complete lack of _hard evidence_ to back up their views"

Didn't Casey Muratori write a proof of concept windows terminal to highlight Microsoft's substandard implementation? And Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade+ developing his own programming language and funding the development of a game. Seems like they are backing their views.

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#68

Post by Someone »

leecommamichael wrote: post #52
hollowturtle wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's GC

Pedantically I’ll say it’s reference counted, and someone else will say that’s still a form of GC and I’ll just save us the mini-thread. Reference counting has deterministic timing, you can run a deconstructor without registering objects for deletion and running any known finalizers (what you need to do in all GC langs I’m aware of.)

> Reference counting has deterministic timing

Define “deterministic timing”.

- One object going out of scope may mean calling free once, but it also can trigger calling free billions of objects, even for the exact same object

- Even freeing one object can have largely varying running time, e.g. to coalesce free blocks or, because it happens to be the last block in a virtual memory region, to unmap a block of virtual memory, blocking the program potentially for an arbitrary time

- With garbage collection (as with reference counting), lots of the overhead of objects going out of scope can be moved onto a specialized thread.

> you can run a deconstructor without registering objects

Not requiring finalizes does make reference counting easier, yes. The downside is have to store the reference counts somewhere, and keep them up to date (enough)

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#69

Post by scott01 »

tancop wrote: post #30
scott01 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understood, their critique of RAII is twofold: coupling of allocation and initialisation, and enforcement of deallocation. The ease of use of smart pointers makes it tempting to allocate/free of temporary structures even within one single function. Given enough number of such occurrences, it kills performance by a thousand cuts. Also I remember they mentioned it’s not necessary to free memory if you’re ab…

most of that criticism only works on C++. rust does enforce RAII but uses stack allocation for locals by default instead of touching the heap so it skips the slow part. on the other hand there are no constructors (just normal functions) so you cant initialize values in place, only stack allocate and return. i think rust needs to add in place init and change the rules from "always init at declaration site" to "must be…

Thanks for this, I’m actually learning Rust (albeit slowly) atm, and still can’t wrap my head around how arena allocs would fit the borrow checker

Re: Understanding the Odin programming language

#70

Post by andyfilms1 »

fatty_patty89 wrote: post #64
RetroTechie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed "native development". I'll rephrase: Could a toolset to develop in Odin be made to run on (not just target) an STM32 microcontroller like you used? > It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures That suggests the above would (in theory) be possible for any device that's roughly in the same class as "can run a C compiler". Correct?

> It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures it's not, it's llvm

Okay, I mean obviously :D I was more trying to convey the feeling of it.
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