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Marketing the Odin programming language is weird

67 points by 0x0203 2y ago

0x0203 2y ago
I thought the funding section was a little odd; I was under the impression that Bill was being paid by JangaFX to develop/maintain the language? But I think the corporate sponsorship of language development should be the norm. If existing languages are not sufficient to solve a business need, then they should pay for the development of a new one (or directly support one they rely on). But making a language "popular" and widely used is directly opposed to making it paid. There are plenty of closed languages out there, but they're only used by the corporations that developed them, and are probably kept closed to make sure the language doesn't stray from their business needs, and/or to maintain a competitive advantage. Otherwise, I'm generally a fan of Odin, but I do find it quite irritating that only place to ask questions and participate in the "community" is locked behind discord. I even gritted my teeth and tried to make an account for discord just for this, but discord wouldn't accept my (apparently mandatory) phone number. Community questions and answers need to be readable and searchable without yet another login. If I'm learning a language and can't find an answer to a question that was almost certainly asked already, that's just another stumbling block that will prevent me from using said language.
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  And if that's the case, me too. I understand that IRC is plain and boring but discord I avoid. Shame, I've never seen Odin before and got excited over the show cases. I've been looking to tinker with another language outside of the main three, (python, go, rust) and this looks nice. I think I may try Lazarus again.
  - lylejantzi3rd 2y ago
    > I think I may try Lazarus again. Why Lazarus? You're talking about the Pascal RAD IDE, right?
    - doublerabbit 2y ago
      Yeah.
- sshine 2y ago
  > I do find it quite irritating that only place to ask questions [is] discord It's a tradeoff. The platform is a closed-source silo. But for a lot of people, it works really well. I avoided it until eventually one community made me want to be a member. Those who dislike Discord in that community set up relay bots. > Community questions and answers need to be readable and searchable without yet another login. This is a big tragedy that any technical community will suffer from long-term for choosing Discord: They may cultivate a community, but they will not grow their garden of knowledge. But to have your resources and attention spread too thin can be devastating, too. Only huge projects can afford to have multiple Discords, Telegrams, IRCs, Wikis, and not worry too much about the overflow and redundancy. Small projects like Odin must focus on having a few high-traffic places.
  - r-w 2y ago
    One word: Discourse.
  - archargelod 2y ago
    > Only huge projects can afford to have multiple Discords, Telegrams, IRCs, Wikis There's one option available to small projects and actually you already named it yourself: > relay bots. Take for example Nim community. It's not huge by any margin, but we have fairly active forum[0], occasionally active Telegram channel and most of activity is on Discord, IRC and Matrix. I've grouped these three because they're almost seamlessly connected with relay bots into one platform. You can join one of several bridged platforms[1] and talk to everyone on Discord, Gitter, Matrix, etc. with quotes, pings and attachments working as you'd expect them to. It is certainly an extra burden to moderate and manage all of this, but now you can atleast have an IRC archive[2] that's indexable and searchable [3]. On the other hand, having Discord as your *only* place for discussions is plain stupid (read: foolish). Because I know several people, including myself some years ago, that just 'nope out' from using a project when they see that the only place to get support is a Discord channel. [0] - https://forum.nim-lang.org/ https://forum.nim-lang.org/ [1] - https://nim-lang.org/community.html https://nim-lang.org/community.html [2] - https://irclogs.nim-lang.org/30-05-2012.html https://irclogs.nim-lang.org/30-05-2012.html [3] - https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Airclogs.nim-lang.org+JS+backend&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Airclogs.nim-lang.org...
indulona 2y ago
before reading the article, i have to say that odin won't make it unless it will invest serious time into networking. graphics, which is where odin shines, is very niche market and i bet that once JB's Jai comes to public, it might crush odin in this field by sheer persona behind the language in this specific niche. what makes or breaks language is the ecosystem and abilities to use it in various domains. today, the internet/networking moves mountains. it's where the most engineering and money is. if you cannot write fast http/rest/grpc servers with most used databases, your language will fade away into obsolescence, because it might bring nice new features, but if it cannot be used in the most popular fields, it will not make it. and odin is suffering in this aspect tremendously. it has the simple go-inspired syntax going on, but it has no oop/methods, so right there you have an obstacle for new users - it is too different from the norm. it might have great integration with various graphics libraries but it if is too different and lacks the ecosystem of libraries, package manager... there is no reason for it to exist. it also requires GIGABYTES of crap you need to download on windows in order to be able to compile a program. it also needs IDE support, mostly jetbrains, visual studio and vs code, which are the dominant IDEs today. in short, if it lacks convenience of Go or Zig, or even Rust, there really is no point in investing time into it. PS: this is just off the cuff comment, not too thought out. also, Odin has a chance to beat Zig, due to better syntax and being essentially complete, beside having official spec. Which is not the case of Zig. Zig has traction but lacks in areas where Odin does not. So I would focus on Zig as the competitor, Rust as second. The simplified go-like syntax is one of the main selling points. But there must be more to the language. PPS: I think the choice of ^ to handle pointers is one of the worst decision in the syntax. The * and & are the norm and should not be messed with.
- 0x0203 2y ago
  > it also requires GIGABYTES of crap you need to download on windows I was surprised by this since all I need on Linux is llvm and clang, but looking at the official getting started page, it does indeed say "MSVC compiler and windows SDK" are required. Is that really the only way to run it on windows, or is that just the path most familiar to a typical windows developer? I personally disagree with saying it requires IDE support. I want to write a ctags parser for it, but that's all I would ever use; as a die-hard vim user, I never liked all the language server stuff people are so reliant on these days. But if that's what people want to use, it's available for Odin as well: https://odin-lang.org/showcase/ols/ https://odin-lang.org/showcase/ols/ -or- https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols
deleted 2y ago
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rwbt 2y ago
I recently used Odin in a commercial project and had a great experience. For me the biggest hurdle was not the language, but having to write programs without an IDE like Visual Studio/Xcode. Having to write my own build scripts (shell or batch files) etc and maintaining them is a PITA. But I'm glad I did it because it checks off all the "C but nicer" checkboxes.
- dkersten 2y ago
  The fact that it not only doesn’t have a built in build tool/package manager, but that the author has also said he doesn’t believe in them and will never make one was very off putting to me. I love how languages like Rust have cargo, or gleam has it built right into the compiler. I’m so fed up with how in C++ or Python there’s a billion competing tools. The language looked really cool, but without good author-blessed tooling, I doubt I’ll ever use it myself.
  - boxed 2y ago
    At least in Python you can probably download a project and run it even ignoring whatever tool the author used. In C++? Good luck!
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Only if it doesn't depend on binary libraries, or anything beyond its batteries.
      - boxed 2y ago
        ..or things that are trivial to find on pypi. Which is going to be 90+% of cases.
        pjmlp 2y ago
        It those things on Pypi depend on binary libraries that you need to compile yourself, there is going to be some fun, depending on the state of the current system.
brabel 2y ago
The best marketing for me is to see lots of useful/large projects using the language. That's why I invest time in Rust: lots of things are built on Rust, as the constant flow of "ABC written in Rust" posts on HN and other forums can attest to. Because that means that people who are good enough to write those things thought that Rust was a good choice. Go is the same thing: I learned it because in devops it's the dominant language, which tells me it must be pretty good for those use cases (even if so many people dislike it, no one can claim it's not good enough). I've looked into Odin and thought it was interesting, but given the amount of work being put into Zig, right now I feel like that's the safest choice (I must say I dislike how even basic things are still being changed in Zig, but no one said it would be otherwise so that's on me). Zig gives very tangible benefits, like not depending on just the LLVM (WIP) as a compiler backend, being able to compile to basically any combination of C stdlib/arch/OS from anywhere without worrying about toolchains and other things that I believe Odin lags behind, despite perhaps being the better language of the two when looking solely at its design (I am not too sure about that as I haven't used Odin for anything yet, and done very little Zig).
frou_dh 2y ago
Get some of those annoying YouTuber “dev influencers” to cover it and that will get all the developer teenagers hyped about it. It almost goes without saying that the YouTuber should also be gurning in the thumbnail.
- diggan 2y ago
  Great way to get freshly made developers to use something, but for the rest of us? Probably has the opposite effect if any.
- hluska 2y ago
  Why brand a language via “annoying” influencers? The pro is obviously visibility, but doesn’t that switch the problem from visibility into reputation management?
- lylejantzi3rd 2y ago
  Did you even do a search in youtube for "odin language"? Lots of dev influencers have covered odin, including an hour long interview the Primeagen did with GingerBill about odin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVa9mgRcVPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVa9mgRcVPs
foo42 2y ago
There's a good episode of the "Developer voices" podcast with Ginger Bill about Odin. (There are many other good episodes too - it's one of the best developer podcasts about imo)
- akkad33 2y ago
  Is ginger bill his real name
blueredmodern 2y ago
[dead]
murlin 2y ago
Rather sure that the only way to market most anything is to make it very visible and quickly understandable (or have the appearance of). It's unclear to me what Ginger Bill expects from the language, a less used and well loved tool is good too (tee hee). Amongst whom should it be popular? How do you make as many of them as possible understand what problems it solves? Money's a different question hey - there's more funding in open source than there used to be and you can really just ask for money and fill out paperwork and get grants and such if it's a useful project, otherwise it will need to embed into some kinds of important projects so that companies need to invest in it. Can Odin do that? Asking the internet how to market a niche thing that they've never built is questionable at the outset though :v) Do wish the best for Odin though, it's kino.
fire_lake 2y ago
It seems that Odin and Zig target similar use cases. How do they compare?
- fallingsquirrel 2y ago
  I evaluated both some time ago. The standout difference for me was Zig requires you initialize all variables and struct fields explicitly, but Odin implicitly initializes variables and forgotten struct fields to their "zero value" (0/null).
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    Zig allows default values in the struct declaration which eases the pain quite a bit (while still making it impossible to forget initializing items).
    - fallingsquirrel 2y ago
      Funny you should say that. I don't find it painful at all, I prefer the explicitness. I just wanted to relay my experience without unnecessarily bundling my opinion, since this is a thread about Odin after all.
  - fire_lake 2y ago
    This is a tiny difference in the context of all language design decisions!
- deleted 2y ago
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- dsego 2y ago
  Here are some references, I think Odin is more tasteful and sensible with a cleaner syntax. https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2019/05/13/a-reply-to-the-road-to-zig/ https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2019/05/13/a-reply-to-the... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFFcCLzOOyw&t=676s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFFcCLzOOyw&t=676s https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162056
FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
The SoA features look really nice. I have wanted that forever. Matrices are built in(!), and look nicely implemented. So are complex numbers and quaternions! The array programming aspects in general look great. Zig might be the nicer language for a kernel or a server of some kind, but Odin looks like the better language not just for games, but also for robotics and for scientific programming. The only problem I forsee is that it seems hard to write nice mathematical libraries for anything that isn't built in. For example, suppose I want to work with polynomials using a natural infix syntax. Or that I want to wrap matrices/quaternions in types representing various mathematical groups. Or that I want to implement geometric algebra with wedge products and such. Or that I want to form matrices of elements from some finite field. Those sorts of things might push a person back to C++ (or maybe Nim can do it). I love the SoA/array/matrix stuff though, and the "standard package" selections look great.
throwaway313373 2y ago
I think that it is hard to market a new "pragmatic" language because the pragmatic decision in most cases is to use an existing language that you already know, that has a community around it with all it's accumulated wisdom (documentation, tutorials, blog posts, StackOverflow Q&A), rich library ecosystem etc. The main point of "killer feature" is not to make the language more "hypeable" but to give a potential user a clear reason why the benefits of learning your language will outweigh the costs of using a less mature or less popular technology.
- wavemode 2y ago
  I think the best approach is to make your language seamlessly interoperable with some existing language.
  - throwaway313373 2y ago
    I guess it does help by making the cost of adoption lower. But my main point is that being an early adopter of a non-mainstream tech is fundamentally unpragmatic and usually people are driven to try something new by desire to try something __cool__ not by pragmatic considerations.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    Well that usually has significant downsides too so it's not as simple as "do that". But yeah if you can do that it's a big benefit.
  - thih9 2y ago
    The success of TypeScript, a syntactic superset of JS and recently the fastest growing programming language, seems to confirm it.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - ksp-atlas 2y ago
    That is one thing that could be a killer feature and I like Zig for it, but I can see myself using a language without that level of interoperability if it has a good enough killer feature set
bobajeff 2y ago
Odin's issue isn't hypeabilty but Googleability. I think for while I had to type odin-lang to find resources on it instead of The Odin Project. I actually really enjoyed the language back when I'd used it. One issue I think every language leaves out there is that the language is just a tool and increasingly only one part of a larger tool the IDE/SDK/Engine/Platform. I don't want to really learn a language so much as make useful programs. Right now we all pay attention when someone announces their new language that's supposed to do things better than existing ones out there but there is a limit to what problems a new language can address. If you want to make a game for the Switch/PlayStation/Xbox you'll need an SDK and likely can't even use anything but c or c++. If you don't want to make your own engine you'll use whatever languages the engine uses to get things done in. If you want to make a cross platform app that handles accessibility and internationalization you're going to be making a web or electron app. As much as I am interested in APL, Lisp and smalltalk right now, I get stuck when I ask 'What project am I interested in using this in?'
- baranul 2y ago
  Arguably the reason why Odin has no or less Googleability, is it has no Wikipedia page, no books on Amazon, and few third party code examples at known places for programming enthusiasts. For any language to be taken seriously, their developers or fans should at least spend more time on that than hype. The main thing it seems to have, is the hype and the cult of personality around its creator, ginger bill and lots of interviews and close ups of red hair. The problem with that, it becomes more about him and the bragging about his achievements. > I don't want to really learn a language so much as make useful programs. That's why instead of the language creator bragging about themselves, many users want to be taught or see examples of what the language can actually do for them. That starts with books, code examples, more demo projects, etc...
SleepyMyroslav 2y ago
As someone who's working in gamedev but never ever considered Odin I think that Odin might get more attention if there will be a well known project that is a)open b)good fit for Odin c) not too simplistic. I do not think a game project can be that open but something smaller might do. A project like this would make it clear how language tools work, all integrations and interoperability with languages and libraries look like and such. Even basic questions on build systems and text editor autocomplete setups may throw off hobby devs. Without a hobby project I feel a pro will not have enough information to evaluate language in production environment.
- lylejantzi3rd 2y ago
  Would a 3d animation software like EmberGen[0] qualify? Because they already have it[1]. I think it's going to take something bigger, like a massively popular indie or AAA game that programmed their game in odin using an open source engine. Quite the needle to thread. [0]: https://jangafx.com/software/embergen https://jangafx.com/software/embergen [1]: https://odin-lang.org/showcase/embergen/ https://odin-lang.org/showcase/embergen/
  - jay_kyburz 2y ago
    Yeah, we need to see how all the pieces fit together. The renderer, physics, UI, sound, input handling, asset loading and memory management.
Rusky 2y ago
> those “killer features” are usually absolute nonsense, very niche, or they rarely have any big benefit This is a fantastic way to turn everyone off of your language: dismiss everything they like about the ones they're already using!
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Right? So I'm apparently an idiot for thinking Rust's borrow checker, or Go's blissful deployment experience, or Zig's clever comptime system are good... Ok I guess I'm not going to like Odin then.
akkad33 2y ago
From a look at Odin's site, its pitch sounds awfully similar to Zig
foul 2y ago
>And before people say: “Odin’s ‘killer feature’ is that it has none”, how the heck do you market that? That seems like an anti-marketing feature. Correct me if i'm wrong but it seems to me that there are Zig, Nim, Dart, Carbon, C3, ooc, (maybe Eiffel?) too in this space, and that only counting C/C++ replacements that you can compile in a way or another.
- archargelod 2y ago
  IMO, Nim's killer feature is it's syntax. It's even in it's slogan "Efficient, Expressive, Elegant". HN crowd would not agree with me, but indentation-based syntax is easier to read, less cluttered and more intuitive than multiple nested ()'s or {}'s . And the success of python, despite it's countless flaws is the proof.
  - cb321 2y ago
    Looking over the Odin docs, it seems to me that a short summary might be: Nim provides almost all the same sorts of things as Odin, but with more Python-y syntax, more meta-programming, automatic memory management with opt-out, and less (no) built-in support for multi-dimensional arrays {EDIT: though, of course, Nim has multiple external impls like ArrayMancer, etc. and having flexible syntax makes this mostly a rendezvous-on-one-thing problem}. I also like the way Nim with its command calls and so on is even more compact and "to the point" than Python is. Whenever I go back to Python from Nim, I think to myself "Why all this clutter?" :-)
  - dsego 2y ago
    I hate python's syntax, it might be less cluttered but it's a pain to refactor or play around, because a lot of times you have to re-indent everything before it will work again. And then I also tend to find it harder to find the end of blocks. I think the success of C-style bracket syntax in most other languages apart from Python is the proof of how superior it is.
  - foul 2y ago
    I love everything Nim but that. Spaces-only indentation forces you to write with an at least mediocre code editor and that's a gripe, for the rest it's just me that i'm C-brain-damaged, i even wrote an awk preprocessor for writing multi-line blocks with curly braces delimitation. I don't recommend my habits as the right way, they are probably the wrongest of ways.
zulu-inuoe 2y ago
My understanding of Odin is that it's a relatively thin layer of preprocessor around C. So.. C but nicer?
edm0nd 2y ago
>People expect a programming language and compiler to be free Yes, they should both be free.
thegeekpirate 2y ago
Hey dang, why was this story completely removed? It was near the top an hour or so ago, and now I can't even find it!
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Try the standard HN web page; it has a Search: box at the bottom, which will take you to something like https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=false&query=Odin%20programming%20language&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...
  - thegeekpirate 2y ago
    My point was that it was no longer accessible via normal HN perusing (went through a couple pages of stories), which I found odd since it was fourth or some such an hour prior!
- gradschoolfail 2y ago
  To the 1st q: comments > upvotes indicated that it was generating drama, pending judicial review (it’s a reasonably nonGoodhartian measure, impervious even to meta from the likes of we) Fwiw i really like the top comment (also related to the differentiable (for Rao observers: hypernormal) beast at the heart of Goodhart’s law) And the second comment hints at a possible interesting non-Varian framing of solutions to “common antiresource pool” (nonexcludable but rivalrous antigoods) problems
  - thegeekpirate 2y ago
    Interesting, thanks for the clarification!
ofrzeta 2y ago
Very often these days I read about memory management as a differentiating factor. On one hand there's Rust with more "manual" memory management (I think) opposed to Go with its indeterministic GC pauses (see Discord blog posts about why they prefer Rust to Go because of that). On the other hand there's Go with its very simple automatic memory management. Where does Odin fit in? I see that there are two paragraphs on memory management (https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#allocators https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#allocators) in the overview but they dive into the details very soon and don't really paint the big picture (I think the sentence "This means that Odin programmers must manage their own memory, allocations, and tracking" is not a great selling point, all other things being equal).

67 points by 0x0203 2y ago

I thought the funding section was a little odd; I was under the impression that Bill was being paid by JangaFX to develop/maintain the language? But I think the corporate sponsorship of language development should be the norm. If existing languages are not sufficient to solve a business need, then they should pay for the development of a new one (or directly support one they rely on). But making a language "popular" and widely used is directly opposed to making it paid. There are plenty of closed languages out there, but they're only used by the corporations that developed them, and are probably kept closed to make sure the language doesn't stray from their business needs, and/or to maintain a competitive advantage. Otherwise, I'm generally a fan of Odin, but I do find it quite irritating that only place to ask questions and participate in the "community" is locked behind discord. I even gritted my teeth and tried to make an account for discord just for this, but discord wouldn't accept my (apparently mandatory) phone number. Community questions and answers need to be readable and searchable without yet another login. If I'm learning a language and can't find an answer to a question that was almost certainly asked already, that's just another stumbling block that will prevent me from using said language.

doublerabbit 2y ago
And if that's the case, me too. I understand that IRC is plain and boring but discord I avoid. Shame, I've never seen Odin before and got excited over the show cases. I've been looking to tinker with another language outside of the main three, (python, go, rust) and this looks nice. I think I may try Lazarus again.
- lylejantzi3rd 2y ago
  > I think I may try Lazarus again. Why Lazarus? You're talking about the Pascal RAD IDE, right?
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    Yeah.
sshine 2y ago
> I do find it quite irritating that only place to ask questions [is] discord It's a tradeoff. The platform is a closed-source silo. But for a lot of people, it works really well. I avoided it until eventually one community made me want to be a member. Those who dislike Discord in that community set up relay bots. > Community questions and answers need to be readable and searchable without yet another login. This is a big tragedy that any technical community will suffer from long-term for choosing Discord: They may cultivate a community, but they will not grow their garden of knowledge. But to have your resources and attention spread too thin can be devastating, too. Only huge projects can afford to have multiple Discords, Telegrams, IRCs, Wikis, and not worry too much about the overflow and redundancy. Small projects like Odin must focus on having a few high-traffic places.
- r-w 2y ago
  One word: Discourse.
- archargelod 2y ago
  > Only huge projects can afford to have multiple Discords, Telegrams, IRCs, Wikis There's one option available to small projects and actually you already named it yourself: > relay bots. Take for example Nim community. It's not huge by any margin, but we have fairly active forum[0], occasionally active Telegram channel and most of activity is on Discord, IRC and Matrix. I've grouped these three because they're almost seamlessly connected with relay bots into one platform. You can join one of several bridged platforms[1] and talk to everyone on Discord, Gitter, Matrix, etc. with quotes, pings and attachments working as you'd expect them to. It is certainly an extra burden to moderate and manage all of this, but now you can atleast have an IRC archive[2] that's indexable and searchable [3]. On the other hand, having Discord as your *only* place for discussions is plain stupid (read: foolish). Because I know several people, including myself some years ago, that just 'nope out' from using a project when they see that the only place to get support is a Discord channel. [0] - https://forum.nim-lang.org/ https://forum.nim-lang.org/ [1] - https://nim-lang.org/community.html https://nim-lang.org/community.html [2] - https://irclogs.nim-lang.org/30-05-2012.html https://irclogs.nim-lang.org/30-05-2012.html [3] - https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Airclogs.nim-lang.org+JS+backend&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Airclogs.nim-lang.org...

indulona 2y ago

before reading the article, i have to say that odin won't make it unless it will invest serious time into networking. graphics, which is where odin shines, is very niche market and i bet that once JB's Jai comes to public, it might crush odin in this field by sheer persona behind the language in this specific niche. what makes or breaks language is the ecosystem and abilities to use it in various domains. today, the internet/networking moves mountains. it's where the most engineering and money is. if you cannot write fast http/rest/grpc servers with most used databases, your language will fade away into obsolescence, because it might bring nice new features, but if it cannot be used in the most popular fields, it will not make it. and odin is suffering in this aspect tremendously. it has the simple go-inspired syntax going on, but it has no oop/methods, so right there you have an obstacle for new users - it is too different from the norm. it might have great integration with various graphics libraries but it if is too different and lacks the ecosystem of libraries, package manager... there is no reason for it to exist. it also requires GIGABYTES of crap you need to download on windows in order to be able to compile a program. it also needs IDE support, mostly jetbrains, visual studio and vs code, which are the dominant IDEs today. in short, if it lacks convenience of Go or Zig, or even Rust, there really is no point in investing time into it. PS: this is just off the cuff comment, not too thought out. also, Odin has a chance to beat Zig, due to better syntax and being essentially complete, beside having official spec. Which is not the case of Zig. Zig has traction but lacks in areas where Odin does not. So I would focus on Zig as the competitor, Rust as second. The simplified go-like syntax is one of the main selling points. But there must be more to the language. PPS: I think the choice of ^ to handle pointers is one of the worst decision in the syntax. The * and & are the norm and should not be messed with.

0x0203 2y ago
> it also requires GIGABYTES of crap you need to download on windows I was surprised by this since all I need on Linux is llvm and clang, but looking at the official getting started page, it does indeed say "MSVC compiler and windows SDK" are required. Is that really the only way to run it on windows, or is that just the path most familiar to a typical windows developer? I personally disagree with saying it requires IDE support. I want to write a ctags parser for it, but that's all I would ever use; as a die-hard vim user, I never liked all the language server stuff people are so reliant on these days. But if that's what people want to use, it's available for Odin as well: https://odin-lang.org/showcase/ols/ https://odin-lang.org/showcase/ols/ -or- https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols

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rwbt 2y ago

I recently used Odin in a commercial project and had a great experience. For me the biggest hurdle was not the language, but having to write programs without an IDE like Visual Studio/Xcode. Having to write my own build scripts (shell or batch files) etc and maintaining them is a PITA. But I'm glad I did it because it checks off all the "C but nicer" checkboxes.

dkersten 2y ago
The fact that it not only doesn’t have a built in build tool/package manager, but that the author has also said he doesn’t believe in them and will never make one was very off putting to me. I love how languages like Rust have cargo, or gleam has it built right into the compiler. I’m so fed up with how in C++ or Python there’s a billion competing tools. The language looked really cool, but without good author-blessed tooling, I doubt I’ll ever use it myself.
- boxed 2y ago
  At least in Python you can probably download a project and run it even ignoring whatever tool the author used. In C++? Good luck!
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Only if it doesn't depend on binary libraries, or anything beyond its batteries.
    - boxed 2y ago
      ..or things that are trivial to find on pypi. Which is going to be 90+% of cases.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        It those things on Pypi depend on binary libraries that you need to compile yourself, there is going to be some fun, depending on the state of the current system.

brabel 2y ago

The best marketing for me is to see lots of useful/large projects using the language. That's why I invest time in Rust: lots of things are built on Rust, as the constant flow of "ABC written in Rust" posts on HN and other forums can attest to. Because that means that people who are good enough to write those things thought that Rust was a good choice. Go is the same thing: I learned it because in devops it's the dominant language, which tells me it must be pretty good for those use cases (even if so many people dislike it, no one can claim it's not good enough). I've looked into Odin and thought it was interesting, but given the amount of work being put into Zig, right now I feel like that's the safest choice (I must say I dislike how even basic things are still being changed in Zig, but no one said it would be otherwise so that's on me). Zig gives very tangible benefits, like not depending on just the LLVM (WIP) as a compiler backend, being able to compile to basically any combination of C stdlib/arch/OS from anywhere without worrying about toolchains and other things that I believe Odin lags behind, despite perhaps being the better language of the two when looking solely at its design (I am not too sure about that as I haven't used Odin for anything yet, and done very little Zig).

frou_dh 2y ago

Get some of those annoying YouTuber “dev influencers” to cover it and that will get all the developer teenagers hyped about it. It almost goes without saying that the YouTuber should also be gurning in the thumbnail.

diggan 2y ago
Great way to get freshly made developers to use something, but for the rest of us? Probably has the opposite effect if any.
hluska 2y ago
Why brand a language via “annoying” influencers? The pro is obviously visibility, but doesn’t that switch the problem from visibility into reputation management?
lylejantzi3rd 2y ago
Did you even do a search in youtube for "odin language"? Lots of dev influencers have covered odin, including an hour long interview the Primeagen did with GingerBill about odin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVa9mgRcVPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVa9mgRcVPs

foo42 2y ago

There's a good episode of the "Developer voices" podcast with Ginger Bill about Odin. (There are many other good episodes too - it's one of the best developer podcasts about imo)

akkad33 2y ago
Is ginger bill his real name

blueredmodern 2y ago

[dead]

murlin 2y ago

Rather sure that the only way to market most anything is to make it very visible and quickly understandable (or have the appearance of). It's unclear to me what Ginger Bill expects from the language, a less used and well loved tool is good too (tee hee). Amongst whom should it be popular? How do you make as many of them as possible understand what problems it solves? Money's a different question hey - there's more funding in open source than there used to be and you can really just ask for money and fill out paperwork and get grants and such if it's a useful project, otherwise it will need to embed into some kinds of important projects so that companies need to invest in it. Can Odin do that? Asking the internet how to market a niche thing that they've never built is questionable at the outset though :v) Do wish the best for Odin though, it's kino.

fire_lake 2y ago

It seems that Odin and Zig target similar use cases. How do they compare?

fallingsquirrel 2y ago
I evaluated both some time ago. The standout difference for me was Zig requires you initialize all variables and struct fields explicitly, but Odin implicitly initializes variables and forgotten struct fields to their "zero value" (0/null).
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  Zig allows default values in the struct declaration which eases the pain quite a bit (while still making it impossible to forget initializing items).
  - fallingsquirrel 2y ago
    Funny you should say that. I don't find it painful at all, I prefer the explicitness. I just wanted to relay my experience without unnecessarily bundling my opinion, since this is a thread about Odin after all.
- fire_lake 2y ago
  This is a tiny difference in the context of all language design decisions!
deleted 2y ago
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dsego 2y ago
Here are some references, I think Odin is more tasteful and sensible with a cleaner syntax. https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2019/05/13/a-reply-to-the-road-to-zig/ https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2019/05/13/a-reply-to-the... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFFcCLzOOyw&t=676s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFFcCLzOOyw&t=676s https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36162056

FooBarBizBazz 2y ago

The SoA features look really nice. I have wanted that forever. Matrices are built in(!), and look nicely implemented. So are complex numbers and quaternions! The array programming aspects in general look great. Zig might be the nicer language for a kernel or a server of some kind, but Odin looks like the better language not just for games, but also for robotics and for scientific programming. The only problem I forsee is that it seems hard to write nice mathematical libraries for anything that isn't built in. For example, suppose I want to work with polynomials using a natural infix syntax. Or that I want to wrap matrices/quaternions in types representing various mathematical groups. Or that I want to implement geometric algebra with wedge products and such. Or that I want to form matrices of elements from some finite field. Those sorts of things might push a person back to C++ (or maybe Nim can do it). I love the SoA/array/matrix stuff though, and the "standard package" selections look great.

throwaway313373 2y ago

I think that it is hard to market a new "pragmatic" language because the pragmatic decision in most cases is to use an existing language that you already know, that has a community around it with all it's accumulated wisdom (documentation, tutorials, blog posts, StackOverflow Q&A), rich library ecosystem etc. The main point of "killer feature" is not to make the language more "hypeable" but to give a potential user a clear reason why the benefits of learning your language will outweigh the costs of using a less mature or less popular technology.

wavemode 2y ago
I think the best approach is to make your language seamlessly interoperable with some existing language.
- throwaway313373 2y ago
  I guess it does help by making the cost of adoption lower. But my main point is that being an early adopter of a non-mainstream tech is fundamentally unpragmatic and usually people are driven to try something new by desire to try something __cool__ not by pragmatic considerations.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Well that usually has significant downsides too so it's not as simple as "do that". But yeah if you can do that it's a big benefit.
- thih9 2y ago
  The success of TypeScript, a syntactic superset of JS and recently the fastest growing programming language, seems to confirm it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ksp-atlas 2y ago
  That is one thing that could be a killer feature and I like Zig for it, but I can see myself using a language without that level of interoperability if it has a good enough killer feature set

bobajeff 2y ago

Odin's issue isn't hypeabilty but Googleability. I think for while I had to type odin-lang to find resources on it instead of The Odin Project. I actually really enjoyed the language back when I'd used it. One issue I think every language leaves out there is that the language is just a tool and increasingly only one part of a larger tool the IDE/SDK/Engine/Platform. I don't want to really learn a language so much as make useful programs. Right now we all pay attention when someone announces their new language that's supposed to do things better than existing ones out there but there is a limit to what problems a new language can address. If you want to make a game for the Switch/PlayStation/Xbox you'll need an SDK and likely can't even use anything but c or c++. If you don't want to make your own engine you'll use whatever languages the engine uses to get things done in. If you want to make a cross platform app that handles accessibility and internationalization you're going to be making a web or electron app. As much as I am interested in APL, Lisp and smalltalk right now, I get stuck when I ask 'What project am I interested in using this in?'

baranul 2y ago
Arguably the reason why Odin has no or less Googleability, is it has no Wikipedia page, no books on Amazon, and few third party code examples at known places for programming enthusiasts. For any language to be taken seriously, their developers or fans should at least spend more time on that than hype. The main thing it seems to have, is the hype and the cult of personality around its creator, ginger bill and lots of interviews and close ups of red hair. The problem with that, it becomes more about him and the bragging about his achievements. > I don't want to really learn a language so much as make useful programs. That's why instead of the language creator bragging about themselves, many users want to be taught or see examples of what the language can actually do for them. That starts with books, code examples, more demo projects, etc...

SleepyMyroslav 2y ago

As someone who's working in gamedev but never ever considered Odin I think that Odin might get more attention if there will be a well known project that is a)open b)good fit for Odin c) not too simplistic. I do not think a game project can be that open but something smaller might do. A project like this would make it clear how language tools work, all integrations and interoperability with languages and libraries look like and such. Even basic questions on build systems and text editor autocomplete setups may throw off hobby devs. Without a hobby project I feel a pro will not have enough information to evaluate language in production environment.

lylejantzi3rd 2y ago
Would a 3d animation software like EmberGen[0] qualify? Because they already have it[1]. I think it's going to take something bigger, like a massively popular indie or AAA game that programmed their game in odin using an open source engine. Quite the needle to thread. [0]: https://jangafx.com/software/embergen https://jangafx.com/software/embergen [1]: https://odin-lang.org/showcase/embergen/ https://odin-lang.org/showcase/embergen/
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  Yeah, we need to see how all the pieces fit together. The renderer, physics, UI, sound, input handling, asset loading and memory management.

Rusky 2y ago

> those “killer features” are usually absolute nonsense, very niche, or they rarely have any big benefit This is a fantastic way to turn everyone off of your language: dismiss everything they like about the ones they're already using!

IshKebab 2y ago
Right? So I'm apparently an idiot for thinking Rust's borrow checker, or Go's blissful deployment experience, or Zig's clever comptime system are good... Ok I guess I'm not going to like Odin then.

akkad33 2y ago

From a look at Odin's site, its pitch sounds awfully similar to Zig

foul 2y ago

>And before people say: “Odin’s ‘killer feature’ is that it has none”, how the heck do you market that? That seems like an anti-marketing feature. Correct me if i'm wrong but it seems to me that there are Zig, Nim, Dart, Carbon, C3, ooc, (maybe Eiffel?) too in this space, and that only counting C/C++ replacements that you can compile in a way or another.

archargelod 2y ago
IMO, Nim's killer feature is it's syntax. It's even in it's slogan "Efficient, Expressive, Elegant". HN crowd would not agree with me, but indentation-based syntax is easier to read, less cluttered and more intuitive than multiple nested ()'s or {}'s . And the success of python, despite it's countless flaws is the proof.
- cb321 2y ago
  Looking over the Odin docs, it seems to me that a short summary might be: Nim provides almost all the same sorts of things as Odin, but with more Python-y syntax, more meta-programming, automatic memory management with opt-out, and less (no) built-in support for multi-dimensional arrays {EDIT: though, of course, Nim has multiple external impls like ArrayMancer, etc. and having flexible syntax makes this mostly a rendezvous-on-one-thing problem}. I also like the way Nim with its command calls and so on is even more compact and "to the point" than Python is. Whenever I go back to Python from Nim, I think to myself "Why all this clutter?" :-)
- dsego 2y ago
  I hate python's syntax, it might be less cluttered but it's a pain to refactor or play around, because a lot of times you have to re-indent everything before it will work again. And then I also tend to find it harder to find the end of blocks. I think the success of C-style bracket syntax in most other languages apart from Python is the proof of how superior it is.
- foul 2y ago
  I love everything Nim but that. Spaces-only indentation forces you to write with an at least mediocre code editor and that's a gripe, for the rest it's just me that i'm C-brain-damaged, i even wrote an awk preprocessor for writing multi-line blocks with curly braces delimitation. I don't recommend my habits as the right way, they are probably the wrongest of ways.

zulu-inuoe 2y ago

My understanding of Odin is that it's a relatively thin layer of preprocessor around C. So.. C but nicer?

edm0nd 2y ago

>People expect a programming language and compiler to be free Yes, they should both be free.

thegeekpirate 2y ago

Hey dang, why was this story completely removed? It was near the top an hour or so ago, and now I can't even find it!

082349872349872 2y ago
Try the standard HN web page; it has a Search: box at the bottom, which will take you to something like https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=false&query=Odin%20programming%20language&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...
- thegeekpirate 2y ago
  My point was that it was no longer accessible via normal HN perusing (went through a couple pages of stories), which I found odd since it was fourth or some such an hour prior!
gradschoolfail 2y ago
To the 1st q: comments > upvotes indicated that it was generating drama, pending judicial review (it’s a reasonably nonGoodhartian measure, impervious even to meta from the likes of we) Fwiw i really like the top comment (also related to the differentiable (for Rao observers: hypernormal) beast at the heart of Goodhart’s law) And the second comment hints at a possible interesting non-Varian framing of solutions to “common antiresource pool” (nonexcludable but rivalrous antigoods) problems
- thegeekpirate 2y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the clarification!

ofrzeta 2y ago

Very often these days I read about memory management as a differentiating factor. On one hand there's Rust with more "manual" memory management (I think) opposed to Go with its indeterministic GC pauses (see Discord blog posts about why they prefer Rust to Go because of that). On the other hand there's Go with its very simple automatic memory management. Where does Odin fit in? I see that there are two paragraphs on memory management (https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#allocators https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#allocators) in the overview but they dive into the details very soon and don't really paint the big picture (I think the sentence "This means that Odin programmers must manage their own memory, allocations, and tracking" is not a great selling point, all other things being equal).