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Oh that's so cool! Thanks for sharing. I skimmed a few of these and I'll definitely take a closer look later. I enjoyed your observations on each language as we

Oh that's so cool! Thanks for sharing. I skimmed a few of these and I'll definitely take a closer look later. I enjoyed your observations on each language as well. From a reader standpoint, I enjoy reading emulators written in C the most. It sucks when C is missing features for complex tasks, but emulation seems to fit nicely into what it can do without black magic fuckery. Of course as someone not super experienced with C, writing it feels like an endless sea of "oh god why is this segfaulting". Rust OTOH bothers me to look at because there are so many sigils and language doodads for functionality that seems like it should be really straightforward but whatever, I'm sure that's just because I've barely used it and can't understand it. I've been learning C++ recently because learning materials are usually tailored to it for stuff I'm interested in (vulkan currently), while ignoring a constant nagging feeling that I should stpo being curmudgeon and take a closer look at Rust. I've tried Zig but am not looking too hard atm for many of the reasons you mentioned in your repository, I'm hoping the language will stabilize at some point and that LLMs will help with some of the repetition/verbosity.

59nadir 3y ago
Odin would very likely be a great choice for the stuff that you're trying to do. It's a very straight forward language and has a "vendor" (https://pkg.odin-lang.org/vendor/ https://pkg.odin-lang.org/vendor/) part of the libraries shipped with the compiler that has lots of bindings for gamedev-related things, i.e. OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX, glfw, stb libraries, some audio libraries, etc. On top of that it has swizzling in the language, some automatic array programming features and a standard set of modern niceties like good tagged union support, custom allocators that are standardized, and so on. It's a nice language for pretty much any use case when you want good fundamentals and straight forward solutions without much magic but for gamedev I don't think there's a C/C++ alternative that is as well suited as Odin overall. If you want a brief (but enough to get me excited about trying Odin out) overview of the language you can find one here: https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/ https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/ P.S. I've written a few posts on HN about what I like about Odin in more detail so I won't reiterate those things exactly here, but one of them is recent so you can find it in my comment history.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  Argh, Odin looks so close to perfect for me. The vendor libraries look fantastic. But I'm working up to deploying on Android and using OpenXR. There's support and/or examples of that for C++ and Rust, and I could probably get Zig working either by cross compilation or by exporting to C. But I don't see any documentation or examples for cross compilation for Odin, and that use case seems to fall just outside the range of its built-in batteries. Do you think it's doable?
  - 59nadir 3y ago
    I wouldn't know about Android, really, but I do know that there is some discussion right now about how some consoles are off limits due to not being allowed to ship non-C/C++ code to them and this will be addressed by compiling Odin to a subset of C in the future if I remember correctly. I would probably inquire on the Odin discord server about this particular thing as it's very likely someone has already stumbled upon it: https://discord.com/invite/sVBPHEv https://discord.com/invite/sVBPHEv

59nadir 3y ago

Odin would very likely be a great choice for the stuff that you're trying to do. It's a very straight forward language and has a "vendor" (https://pkg.odin-lang.org/vendor/ https://pkg.odin-lang.org/vendor/) part of the libraries shipped with the compiler that has lots of bindings for gamedev-related things, i.e. OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX, glfw, stb libraries, some audio libraries, etc. On top of that it has swizzling in the language, some automatic array programming features and a standard set of modern niceties like good tagged union support, custom allocators that are standardized, and so on. It's a nice language for pretty much any use case when you want good fundamentals and straight forward solutions without much magic but for gamedev I don't think there's a C/C++ alternative that is as well suited as Odin overall. If you want a brief (but enough to get me excited about trying Odin out) overview of the language you can find one here: https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/ https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/ P.S. I've written a few posts on HN about what I like about Odin in more detail so I won't reiterate those things exactly here, but one of them is recent so you can find it in my comment history.

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
Argh, Odin looks so close to perfect for me. The vendor libraries look fantastic. But I'm working up to deploying on Android and using OpenXR. There's support and/or examples of that for C++ and Rust, and I could probably get Zig working either by cross compilation or by exporting to C. But I don't see any documentation or examples for cross compilation for Odin, and that use case seems to fall just outside the range of its built-in batteries. Do you think it's doable?
- 59nadir 3y ago
  I wouldn't know about Android, really, but I do know that there is some discussion right now about how some consoles are off limits due to not being allowed to ship non-C/C++ code to them and this will be addressed by compiling Odin to a subset of C in the future if I remember correctly. I would probably inquire on the Odin discord server about this particular thing as it's very likely someone has already stumbled upon it: https://discord.com/invite/sVBPHEv https://discord.com/invite/sVBPHEv