9 ms·

Odin and Zig are the two up-and-coming languages that I keep my eye on. I like how they are trying to find a sweet spot where they offer more than plain old C,

Odin and Zig are the two up-and-coming languages that I keep my eye on. I like how they are trying to find a sweet spot where they offer more than plain old C, but without becoming overbearing like Ada, C++, or Rust.

bsaul 4y ago
I’m really surprised to see those language emerge after having read so many praise about rust being a fantastic system language. Although, from a personal standpoint, anytime i see rust code or read about horror stories fighting the compiler i wonder how that language gained so much popularity.
- lucasyvas 4y ago
  It's popular because the compiler is difficult - people would rather suffer the pain at compile time instead of runtime for particular projects, so it is very well suited to those.
  - doliveira 4y ago
    I still feel that we're overdue for some paradigm shift in programming languages. There's a nebulous feeling, probably informed by my amateurishness, that some tasks just shouldn't be this hard. Seeing the whole buzz around GitHub Copilot, which seems to confirm that 90% of the typing we do is useless, makes me think that there's another level of "semantic abstraction" (?) we're missing.
    - taylorius 4y ago
      An interesting point. I wonder if the knowledge contained in github copilot could somehow be extracted to come up with suitable semantic abstractions.
    - zasdffaa 4y ago
      Very interesting. I don't have experience with copilot, but with my own programming I tend to abstract heavily until repetition is removed and there's little to repeat (that said there are places where the language, C# in my case, could support my style of programming better). I'll check out some vids.
    - afranchuk 4y ago
      I think an interesting distinction is this: it's not that 90% of the typing you do is necessarily useless, it's that it's been done before. Copilot is, in a sense, drawing from a corpus of prior work. In that way you are kind of using it as if you found a published library for your more specific use cases. So it's allowing you to draw on prior work without necessarily having external packages split up with the granularity of many variations of functions (which, ideally, would allow you to pull in exactly what you need from prior work, but would certainly be onerous in practice). That being said, I've never used Copilot myself, so I can't speak very confidently about it. But from what I've seen, it kind of allows you to incorporate every library that's ever been made open source into your project, but in a more granular fashion. Which naturally would save you some typing :) P.S. I realize Copilot isn't necessarily copying other code verbatim, though I assume pretty often it basically ends up doing that, at least in pieces.
      - crdrost 4y ago
        This is an interesting take. One does need to draw a distinction between “what everybody writes” (copilot generates) and “what has to be written” (this code is the ‘useless’ stuff bemoaned by the parent comment). Obviously everybody writes what has to be written, but you're right that there is a distinction. One gets a vision of the copilot autocomplete, as kind of missing what would be an essential highlight, in the templates it provides. “These parts highlighted in red, do not change those, for some reason everybody does it that way. But these parts highlighted in yellow, I've seen a bunch of different takes on those; this is where some variation occurs and where you might want to customize it yourself.” On this take, copilot is a poor way of providing syntactic templates—macros—and indeed those macros take the form of template substitution, which means they form in theory a lambda calculus for that metalanguage. That is itself interesting because I only know of one programming language which says “we are going to live out here in la-la-functional-programming-math-land, but we are going to describe values which are actual fragments of computer programs,” and that language is Haskell—though never used to write at this scale!. Interesting to think that the Ur-goal of Copilot is to provide what you were missing because you didn't wrap your language in Haskell in the first place! With that said, a better way to start with metalanguage design if this problem irks you is probably not Haskell itself (it doesn't have an easy way to swap out its compile target language from C-- to some other target, I don't think) but something like Ometa2: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3930 http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3930
    - bsaul 4y ago
      a programming language (together with its standard library) should guide you toward safe code, while keeping an enjoyable experience. Saying "this thing is hard to get right, so the PL should make you feel the pain" is only marginally better than a language that pretends the problem isn't there at all.
    - macintux 4y ago
      I feel like some languages make it much easier (or at least require less code) to accomplish certain tasks (Perl, for text processing, and Erlang for concurrency/distributed systems), while other languages make it more practical to do anything at all, but the tradeoff is that they’re much more verbose. Kitchen sink languages require you to build the kitchen before you can cook.
  - bsaul 4y ago
    there's good difficult, the one that forces you to clarify your point, and there's bad one: the one that makes simple constructs hard or impossible without going through hoops. From my understanding, rust has a little bit of both.
- hsn915 4y ago
  Odin emerged partly out of the "Handmade Network" which is a group of people interested in a style of programming that is very different from what is usually accepted by the rest of the industry as best practice. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4ioc8-lDc0&t=4407s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4ioc8-lDc0&t=4407s
- kaba0 4y ago
  What I genuinely don’t understand is why do we focus so much on the low-level/system front? It is (or very much should be) a small niche, and most business applications are better served by managed languages that won’t get a huge list of vulnerabilities from memory corruption alone.
  - lostdog 4y ago
    Low-level and system programming are the areas most hurting for better languages. High level has several modern scripting languages (Python, Ruby, Javascript), and typed languages (Java, C#, Kotlin). Low-level programming has had C and C++ for 30+ years, and both have major problems that need fixing. Plus, there's lots of interest in having programs run much much faster, especially as people realize that every line of Python they write could be 10x faster in a lower level language, with minimal extra work. This is why Rust, and now Odin, get so much attention. Of course, there's also a renaissance brewing for mid-level languages, including Go, nim, and crystal.
  - Hemospectrum 4y ago
    Systems-level programming is a frontier for language design precisely because higher-level domains are already so well-served by established platforms. If your problem can be solved in Python or JavaScript, you're potentially creating a lot of work for yourself by using a language that's sort of like either of these, but not actually compatible with their libraries. The internet is littered with upstart languages that were made this way and withered on the vine. On the other hand, if you're working in a problem space with tighter performance constraints, and you already can't touch these languages, and you can't even count on libraries written in C or C++, then you suddenly, paradoxically, have a lot more options.
  - shpongled 4y ago
    Personally, I would use Rust even if it was managed/not as low level. Advanced ML type system + best-in-class developer UX/tooling is the biggest selling point for me.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  It combines two things that appeal two large camps of developers, ML style and performance. I even think that its memory safety isn't that the main attractive point. It's like a language that's aim to sell both ML family and C guys, and that's over 50% of volume of devs' voice.
- Tozen 4y ago
  > ...i wonder how that language gained so much popularity. Well, we should not underestimate the power of corporate backers pushing and hyping their languages. And once the hype picks up momentum, it takes a lot to slow it down.
jessermeyer 4y ago
Odin has renewed my joy of programming. Built in bounds checking, slices, distinct typing, no undefined behavior, consistent semantics between optimization modes, minimal implicit type conversions, context system and the standard library tracking allocator combine together to eliminate the majority of memory bugs I found use for sanitizers in C/C++. Now I'm back to logic bugs, which neither Rust nor sanitizers can help you directly with anyway because they rely on program and not language semantics. Obviously these features together do not eliminate those classes of bugs, like Rust, but Odin chooses a different point on the efficient frontier to target, and does so masterfully. To put the cherry on top, the sane package system, buttery smooth syntax, sensible preprocessor (the 'constant system'), generics, LLVM backend for debug info / optimization, open source standard library, simply build system, engaging and well intended community make day to day programming a pleasant experience.
- hsn915 4y ago
  Odin's stance towards undefined behavior was probably the decisive element that made me prefer it over the other languages. https://twitter.com/TheGingerBill/status/1495004577531367425 https://twitter.com/TheGingerBill/status/1495004577531367425
  - raphlinus 4y ago
    How does this work in practice? Is the behavior of a use-after-free defined? Data races? The latter even more so for objects that don't fit in one machine word, such as slices. While avoiding undefined behavior is a noble goal, my personal feeling is that actually achieving that will be much harder than it might first seem, and will probably end up precluding a good deal of optimization. Of course, C has an entire class of UB that is much more excessive than useful, for example left shift of a negative integer. It's clearly and obviously possible to do much better than C. I'm just skeptical that "no UB at all" is in reach for a low-level, systems programming language that is also portable and can be compiled with optimization comparable to C.
    - hsn915 4y ago
tialaramex 4y ago
You might want to also pay attention to Jai (or whatever Jonathan Blow ends up naming it) Like the author of Odin, Blow has significant experience writing software in a specific domain (video games), has strong opinions about what's wrong with existing languages, and decided he could do better. You can't actually use Jai yourself yet, it is as yet a closed beta (though you might know somebody who can get you in), but you can already get a flavour of it and I think it's probably in the sphere of things you'd be interested in judging from your comment. Personally I think we need to stop treating safety as optional, as a C programmer for about 30 years, about 15-20 years of that for pay, I found Rust very pleasant and would now always choose it over C or these C replacements - although currently I get paid to write Python and C# in my day job. But I'm clearly in the minority, for now at least, so I expect at least one of these C replacements like Odin or Zig to get significant adoption. Probably pays to know several of them, as it's far from clear which will succeed and I doubt there's room for all of them over the long term.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  > You can't actually use Jai yourself yet, it is as yet a closed beta (though you might know somebody who can get you in) you can always try asking, worked for me
- Tozen 4y ago
  But, what are people going to do with Jai, that they can't already do with Odin? As Odin was strongly influenced by Jai, it could be argued that most of whatever was innovative, is already incorporated in Odin and available today. Even more, since Odin is publicly available, its arguably being "battle tested" to a higher degree to make it a more polished product. From my understanding, Jai is still years away from a general public release.

bsaul 4y ago

I’m really surprised to see those language emerge after having read so many praise about rust being a fantastic system language. Although, from a personal standpoint, anytime i see rust code or read about horror stories fighting the compiler i wonder how that language gained so much popularity.

lucasyvas 4y ago
It's popular because the compiler is difficult - people would rather suffer the pain at compile time instead of runtime for particular projects, so it is very well suited to those.
- doliveira 4y ago
  I still feel that we're overdue for some paradigm shift in programming languages. There's a nebulous feeling, probably informed by my amateurishness, that some tasks just shouldn't be this hard. Seeing the whole buzz around GitHub Copilot, which seems to confirm that 90% of the typing we do is useless, makes me think that there's another level of "semantic abstraction" (?) we're missing.
  - taylorius 4y ago
    An interesting point. I wonder if the knowledge contained in github copilot could somehow be extracted to come up with suitable semantic abstractions.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    Very interesting. I don't have experience with copilot, but with my own programming I tend to abstract heavily until repetition is removed and there's little to repeat (that said there are places where the language, C# in my case, could support my style of programming better). I'll check out some vids.
  - afranchuk 4y ago
    I think an interesting distinction is this: it's not that 90% of the typing you do is necessarily useless, it's that it's been done before. Copilot is, in a sense, drawing from a corpus of prior work. In that way you are kind of using it as if you found a published library for your more specific use cases. So it's allowing you to draw on prior work without necessarily having external packages split up with the granularity of many variations of functions (which, ideally, would allow you to pull in exactly what you need from prior work, but would certainly be onerous in practice). That being said, I've never used Copilot myself, so I can't speak very confidently about it. But from what I've seen, it kind of allows you to incorporate every library that's ever been made open source into your project, but in a more granular fashion. Which naturally would save you some typing :) P.S. I realize Copilot isn't necessarily copying other code verbatim, though I assume pretty often it basically ends up doing that, at least in pieces.
    - crdrost 4y ago
      This is an interesting take. One does need to draw a distinction between “what everybody writes” (copilot generates) and “what has to be written” (this code is the ‘useless’ stuff bemoaned by the parent comment). Obviously everybody writes what has to be written, but you're right that there is a distinction. One gets a vision of the copilot autocomplete, as kind of missing what would be an essential highlight, in the templates it provides. “These parts highlighted in red, do not change those, for some reason everybody does it that way. But these parts highlighted in yellow, I've seen a bunch of different takes on those; this is where some variation occurs and where you might want to customize it yourself.” On this take, copilot is a poor way of providing syntactic templates—macros—and indeed those macros take the form of template substitution, which means they form in theory a lambda calculus for that metalanguage. That is itself interesting because I only know of one programming language which says “we are going to live out here in la-la-functional-programming-math-land, but we are going to describe values which are actual fragments of computer programs,” and that language is Haskell—though never used to write at this scale!. Interesting to think that the Ur-goal of Copilot is to provide what you were missing because you didn't wrap your language in Haskell in the first place! With that said, a better way to start with metalanguage design if this problem irks you is probably not Haskell itself (it doesn't have an easy way to swap out its compile target language from C-- to some other target, I don't think) but something like Ometa2: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3930 http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3930
  - bsaul 4y ago
    a programming language (together with its standard library) should guide you toward safe code, while keeping an enjoyable experience. Saying "this thing is hard to get right, so the PL should make you feel the pain" is only marginally better than a language that pretends the problem isn't there at all.
  - macintux 4y ago
    I feel like some languages make it much easier (or at least require less code) to accomplish certain tasks (Perl, for text processing, and Erlang for concurrency/distributed systems), while other languages make it more practical to do anything at all, but the tradeoff is that they’re much more verbose. Kitchen sink languages require you to build the kitchen before you can cook.
- bsaul 4y ago
  there's good difficult, the one that forces you to clarify your point, and there's bad one: the one that makes simple constructs hard or impossible without going through hoops. From my understanding, rust has a little bit of both.
hsn915 4y ago
Odin emerged partly out of the "Handmade Network" which is a group of people interested in a style of programming that is very different from what is usually accepted by the rest of the industry as best practice. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4ioc8-lDc0&t=4407s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4ioc8-lDc0&t=4407s
kaba0 4y ago
What I genuinely don’t understand is why do we focus so much on the low-level/system front? It is (or very much should be) a small niche, and most business applications are better served by managed languages that won’t get a huge list of vulnerabilities from memory corruption alone.
- lostdog 4y ago
  Low-level and system programming are the areas most hurting for better languages. High level has several modern scripting languages (Python, Ruby, Javascript), and typed languages (Java, C#, Kotlin). Low-level programming has had C and C++ for 30+ years, and both have major problems that need fixing. Plus, there's lots of interest in having programs run much much faster, especially as people realize that every line of Python they write could be 10x faster in a lower level language, with minimal extra work. This is why Rust, and now Odin, get so much attention. Of course, there's also a renaissance brewing for mid-level languages, including Go, nim, and crystal.
- Hemospectrum 4y ago
  Systems-level programming is a frontier for language design precisely because higher-level domains are already so well-served by established platforms. If your problem can be solved in Python or JavaScript, you're potentially creating a lot of work for yourself by using a language that's sort of like either of these, but not actually compatible with their libraries. The internet is littered with upstart languages that were made this way and withered on the vine. On the other hand, if you're working in a problem space with tighter performance constraints, and you already can't touch these languages, and you can't even count on libraries written in C or C++, then you suddenly, paradoxically, have a lot more options.
- shpongled 4y ago
  Personally, I would use Rust even if it was managed/not as low level. Advanced ML type system + best-in-class developer UX/tooling is the biggest selling point for me.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
It combines two things that appeal two large camps of developers, ML style and performance. I even think that its memory safety isn't that the main attractive point. It's like a language that's aim to sell both ML family and C guys, and that's over 50% of volume of devs' voice.
Tozen 4y ago
> ...i wonder how that language gained so much popularity. Well, we should not underestimate the power of corporate backers pushing and hyping their languages. And once the hype picks up momentum, it takes a lot to slow it down.

jessermeyer 4y ago

Odin has renewed my joy of programming. Built in bounds checking, slices, distinct typing, no undefined behavior, consistent semantics between optimization modes, minimal implicit type conversions, context system and the standard library tracking allocator combine together to eliminate the majority of memory bugs I found use for sanitizers in C/C++. Now I'm back to logic bugs, which neither Rust nor sanitizers can help you directly with anyway because they rely on program and not language semantics. Obviously these features together do not eliminate those classes of bugs, like Rust, but Odin chooses a different point on the efficient frontier to target, and does so masterfully. To put the cherry on top, the sane package system, buttery smooth syntax, sensible preprocessor (the 'constant system'), generics, LLVM backend for debug info / optimization, open source standard library, simply build system, engaging and well intended community make day to day programming a pleasant experience.

hsn915 4y ago
Odin's stance towards undefined behavior was probably the decisive element that made me prefer it over the other languages. https://twitter.com/TheGingerBill/status/1495004577531367425 https://twitter.com/TheGingerBill/status/1495004577531367425
- raphlinus 4y ago
  How does this work in practice? Is the behavior of a use-after-free defined? Data races? The latter even more so for objects that don't fit in one machine word, such as slices. While avoiding undefined behavior is a noble goal, my personal feeling is that actually achieving that will be much harder than it might first seem, and will probably end up precluding a good deal of optimization. Of course, C has an entire class of UB that is much more excessive than useful, for example left shift of a negative integer. It's clearly and obviously possible to do much better than C. I'm just skeptical that "no UB at all" is in reach for a low-level, systems programming language that is also portable and can be compiled with optimization comparable to C.
  - hsn915 4y ago

tialaramex 4y ago

You might want to also pay attention to Jai (or whatever Jonathan Blow ends up naming it) Like the author of Odin, Blow has significant experience writing software in a specific domain (video games), has strong opinions about what's wrong with existing languages, and decided he could do better. You can't actually use Jai yourself yet, it is as yet a closed beta (though you might know somebody who can get you in), but you can already get a flavour of it and I think it's probably in the sphere of things you'd be interested in judging from your comment. Personally I think we need to stop treating safety as optional, as a C programmer for about 30 years, about 15-20 years of that for pay, I found Rust very pleasant and would now always choose it over C or these C replacements - although currently I get paid to write Python and C# in my day job. But I'm clearly in the minority, for now at least, so I expect at least one of these C replacements like Odin or Zig to get significant adoption. Probably pays to know several of them, as it's far from clear which will succeed and I doubt there's room for all of them over the long term.

adamrezich 4y ago
> You can't actually use Jai yourself yet, it is as yet a closed beta (though you might know somebody who can get you in) you can always try asking, worked for me
Tozen 4y ago
But, what are people going to do with Jai, that they can't already do with Odin? As Odin was strongly influenced by Jai, it could be argued that most of whatever was innovative, is already incorporated in Odin and available today. Even more, since Odin is publicly available, its arguably being "battle tested" to a higher degree to make it a more polished product. From my understanding, Jai is still years away from a general public release.