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As being able to use a language to write an editor is a personal must-have in a language, your mention of kilo caught my eye. I did a quick read through of the

As being able to use a language to write an editor is a personal must-have in a language, your mention of kilo caught my eye. I did a quick read through of the Odin overview and FAQ and my initial impressions are positive. Bonus points to them for multiple return values and no automatic fallthrough on switch. Have you tried zig? I'm casually looking for a C replacement and I took a quick look at zig but came away not liking the community vibe (some things were too dictatorial for my tastes). If you did anything with zig, how would you say the languages compare?

dartos 2y ago
Odin and Zig both have dictators. Both are very nice people as long as you’re nice yourself, imo. My opinions: Odin’s creator has some strong opinions around not prioritizing LSPs and QoL tools around Odin. Zig’s is a little more hard nosed about simplicity. Zig is a very small language for a reason. I’m on my zig arc now, but Odin is next.
- przmk 2y ago
  Not prioritizing tools is a mistake imho. I'd argue it helps a lot with adoption and you end up with useful tools.
  - meheleventyone 2y ago
    Odin actually has a pretty great LSP already.
  - dartos 2y ago
    If your goal is viral adoption, I agree, but it sounds like Odin is kind of geared towards the graphics programming world and doesn’t require vitality at this stage.
- FullGarden_S 2y ago
  >Odin’s creator has some strong opinions around not prioritizing LSPs and QoL tools around Odin. no, he does not. He just doesn't use LSP but never did he ever oppose QoL tools. Odin has great support for LSP and they are working on other tools as well. Do note that Odin doesn't have a foundation like Rust or Zig so their pace of development will be at their own discretion. Please don't expect it to be similar to Zig or other well funded languages.
  - dismalaf 2y ago
    > no, he does not. He just doesn't use LSP but never did he ever oppose QoL tools. He's somewhat against package managers (doesn't want Odin ecosystem turning into NPM or Crates.io where a single package draws in a thousand dependencies). But yeah, Odin's LSP is used by most Odin users, including staff at JangaFX.
    - FullGarden_S 2y ago
      >He's somewhat against package managers yes and that is a design decision. Its not just the dependencies bloatware, there is also an issue of accidentally pulling in a GLP license code base and several others. But if one wishes to make a package manager for Odin, they can do so and other Odin users may use it if they found it to be really helpful but from what I know, Ginger Bill will never officially support it as it doesn't align with his vision of the language.
      - gingerBill 2y ago
        There is nothing in the design of Odin that prevents a package manager from being created, in fact quite the opposite. The decision, which is not design per se, is to not have an OFFICIAL package manager, nor even endorse a third party one.
  - dartos 2y ago
    I recall a thread from a few years ago where people were saying that zig had better LSO support than Odin and saying that Odin should prioritize that more. I recall gingerBill saying that he’d rather work on the language than adoption. Which is a fine position to have. Never did I say he was morally against LSPs or anything, just that he has strong opinions on prioritizing its development vs the language itself. Please don’t put words in my mouth. I’m trying to be very clear. The Odin lsp I found (ols) is not official and not made by gingerBill. Which, again, is fine. It’s good that the community took up the burden of making an LSP.
    - FullGarden_S 2y ago
- dismalaf 2y ago
  Odin has a great LSP. Gingerbill is mainly against package managers because ecosystems like NPM and Crates.io are a mess...
  - anacrolix 2y ago
    They are a beautiful mess. crates is actually fantastic. Being anti package management is very unproductive. It's gross but it's super productive
    - dismalaf 2y ago
      Odin does have a pretty nice "package management" story. You can literally just throw a folder with Odin files into your project structure and it "just works". The compiler sees it and includes it automatically. I don't hate cargo either, I've also used Ruby for years, gem is nice, but in both ecosystems there's also a ton of abandoned packages, some that haven't been touched in years...
      - lolinder 2y ago
        > You can literally just throw a folder with Odin files into your project structure and it "just works". The compiler sees it and includes it automatically. This is true of most modern languages. That's not the problem package management is solving. Package management is solving the problem of how you decide which versions of which files to put into your project, considering the fact that dependencies may form a complex graph, not a simple tree. A language can decide that it simply won't support complicated dependency graphs, which is a valid decision but is the opposite of having a nice package management story.
        dismalaf 2y ago
        Well, being able to simply chuck files into your project and not deal with actually importing, linking, etc... means that you can then just use something like git to manage files. Anyhow, I've used Odin, it's easy, never found the lack of package manager to be annoying. I've also used Rust, cargo is nice. I think I maybe lean a tad to the way Odin works, if for no other reason than crates.io is a graveyard of dead projects and you constantly have to see what's active and what's not, I find myself going to each project's GitHub anyway. With Odin I just import librairies straight from GitHub. And both are easier than C/C++'s lack of, well, anything.
- suby 2y ago
  Zig's compiler error on unused variables is a deal breaker for me unfortunately. The language author also has an insulting attitude towards anyone who wants otherwise, categorizing them as bad programmers he doesn't want to work with and doesn't want using Zig. The compiler error on variables which are mutable when could be const is almost as annoying. Zig does not acknowledge that not all code is production code, that sometimes you want to prototype without having to backtrack and fix compiler errors to irrelevant things when the goal is prototyping and figuring out what you are building. It also adds friction to learning the language because statements you write will immediately get flagged as wrong -- is it actually wrong due to your unfamiliarity with the language, or is it just the lsp immediately flagging and underlining all unused as red. Better take a moment to check. Super annoying to me. I can't get past it, nor do I trust the author of Zig to not go even further in this direction. He has made it clear he will not compromise on this issue. There are more planned similar errors on the way here. At least it looks like they are no loner planning to do compiler errors on unused pub functions if they are not accessible from outside the package. Zig: Trust the programmer to manually manage memory, but not to clean up unused variables. The language is weirdly pedantic, in ways orthogonal to Rust.
  - dsego 2y ago
    > Zig: Trust the programmer to manually manage memory, but not to clean up unused variables. That's such a good tagline, actually one of the things that annoyed me with zig as well. The other one is the lack of attention to syntax aesthetics and ergonomics, it's a bit all over the place and I am also not fond of semicolons.
  - do_not_redeem 2y ago
    The worst part is if you have an unused variable the compiler won't even show you the real errors until you fix all the warnings first. > Compile error: This variable of type `Foo` is unused Ok then, I'll just remove that, and... > Compile error: This function you're calling expects an argument of type `Foo` Just kill me.
  - paulddraper 2y ago
    "Let me comment this line out" "Oh and I have to do this one too" "Oh and this five as well" "Almost there" "Nope"
- gingerBill 2y ago
  I am the creator of the Odin programming language. That's not even my opinion... I do not personally use an LSP for my own personal reasons (I found I PERSONALLY was less productive with such tools). I am not against the concept of autocompletion tools like an LSP. If you are more productive using one, that is great!!! OLS exists but OLS is just not "official"—even if it is very good from what many people have told me. The only reason it is not official is that none of the core team worked on it, including myself. As for QoL tools? Of course we want these but our philosophy is make sure the foundations are brilliant first before half-arsing the tool built on top of the foundations.
melon_tusk 2y ago
The Zig-community is annoyingly political, whereas the Odin community and -creator focuses on technology.
- cgh 2y ago
  How is the Zig community political? I use the language but I’m not involved with the community at all.
  - melon_tusk 2y ago
    Just follow Andrew Kelley on whatever platform he hasn't ragequit from these days.
    - poncho_romero 2y ago
      Please give us some examples
    - cgh 2y ago
      Andrew Kelley is just one guy and he’s allowed to express his own political opinions online, just as you are. What evidence is there that the community as a whole is “annoyingly political”?
- dpatterbee 2y ago
  There's no community in the world that isn't political. Perhaps the issue is actually just that you disagree with the politics that are popular there?
  - melon_tusk 2y ago
    No, the "C community" and creators aren't making a political stance on things at all. Lua doesn't either. The Zig creator is very outspoken on political matters.
    - poncho_romero 2y ago

dartos 2y ago

Odin and Zig both have dictators. Both are very nice people as long as you’re nice yourself, imo. My opinions: Odin’s creator has some strong opinions around not prioritizing LSPs and QoL tools around Odin. Zig’s is a little more hard nosed about simplicity. Zig is a very small language for a reason. I’m on my zig arc now, but Odin is next.

przmk 2y ago
Not prioritizing tools is a mistake imho. I'd argue it helps a lot with adoption and you end up with useful tools.
- meheleventyone 2y ago
  Odin actually has a pretty great LSP already.
- dartos 2y ago
  If your goal is viral adoption, I agree, but it sounds like Odin is kind of geared towards the graphics programming world and doesn’t require vitality at this stage.
FullGarden_S 2y ago
>Odin’s creator has some strong opinions around not prioritizing LSPs and QoL tools around Odin. no, he does not. He just doesn't use LSP but never did he ever oppose QoL tools. Odin has great support for LSP and they are working on other tools as well. Do note that Odin doesn't have a foundation like Rust or Zig so their pace of development will be at their own discretion. Please don't expect it to be similar to Zig or other well funded languages.
- dismalaf 2y ago
  > no, he does not. He just doesn't use LSP but never did he ever oppose QoL tools. He's somewhat against package managers (doesn't want Odin ecosystem turning into NPM or Crates.io where a single package draws in a thousand dependencies). But yeah, Odin's LSP is used by most Odin users, including staff at JangaFX.
  - FullGarden_S 2y ago
    >He's somewhat against package managers yes and that is a design decision. Its not just the dependencies bloatware, there is also an issue of accidentally pulling in a GLP license code base and several others. But if one wishes to make a package manager for Odin, they can do so and other Odin users may use it if they found it to be really helpful but from what I know, Ginger Bill will never officially support it as it doesn't align with his vision of the language.
    - gingerBill 2y ago
      There is nothing in the design of Odin that prevents a package manager from being created, in fact quite the opposite. The decision, which is not design per se, is to not have an OFFICIAL package manager, nor even endorse a third party one.
- dartos 2y ago
  I recall a thread from a few years ago where people were saying that zig had better LSO support than Odin and saying that Odin should prioritize that more. I recall gingerBill saying that he’d rather work on the language than adoption. Which is a fine position to have. Never did I say he was morally against LSPs or anything, just that he has strong opinions on prioritizing its development vs the language itself. Please don’t put words in my mouth. I’m trying to be very clear. The Odin lsp I found (ols) is not official and not made by gingerBill. Which, again, is fine. It’s good that the community took up the burden of making an LSP.
  - FullGarden_S 2y ago
dismalaf 2y ago
Odin has a great LSP. Gingerbill is mainly against package managers because ecosystems like NPM and Crates.io are a mess...
- anacrolix 2y ago
  They are a beautiful mess. crates is actually fantastic. Being anti package management is very unproductive. It's gross but it's super productive
  - dismalaf 2y ago
    Odin does have a pretty nice "package management" story. You can literally just throw a folder with Odin files into your project structure and it "just works". The compiler sees it and includes it automatically. I don't hate cargo either, I've also used Ruby for years, gem is nice, but in both ecosystems there's also a ton of abandoned packages, some that haven't been touched in years...
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > You can literally just throw a folder with Odin files into your project structure and it "just works". The compiler sees it and includes it automatically. This is true of most modern languages. That's not the problem package management is solving. Package management is solving the problem of how you decide which versions of which files to put into your project, considering the fact that dependencies may form a complex graph, not a simple tree. A language can decide that it simply won't support complicated dependency graphs, which is a valid decision but is the opposite of having a nice package management story.
      - dismalaf 2y ago
        Well, being able to simply chuck files into your project and not deal with actually importing, linking, etc... means that you can then just use something like git to manage files. Anyhow, I've used Odin, it's easy, never found the lack of package manager to be annoying. I've also used Rust, cargo is nice. I think I maybe lean a tad to the way Odin works, if for no other reason than crates.io is a graveyard of dead projects and you constantly have to see what's active and what's not, I find myself going to each project's GitHub anyway. With Odin I just import librairies straight from GitHub. And both are easier than C/C++'s lack of, well, anything.
suby 2y ago
Zig's compiler error on unused variables is a deal breaker for me unfortunately. The language author also has an insulting attitude towards anyone who wants otherwise, categorizing them as bad programmers he doesn't want to work with and doesn't want using Zig. The compiler error on variables which are mutable when could be const is almost as annoying. Zig does not acknowledge that not all code is production code, that sometimes you want to prototype without having to backtrack and fix compiler errors to irrelevant things when the goal is prototyping and figuring out what you are building. It also adds friction to learning the language because statements you write will immediately get flagged as wrong -- is it actually wrong due to your unfamiliarity with the language, or is it just the lsp immediately flagging and underlining all unused as red. Better take a moment to check. Super annoying to me. I can't get past it, nor do I trust the author of Zig to not go even further in this direction. He has made it clear he will not compromise on this issue. There are more planned similar errors on the way here. At least it looks like they are no loner planning to do compiler errors on unused pub functions if they are not accessible from outside the package. Zig: Trust the programmer to manually manage memory, but not to clean up unused variables. The language is weirdly pedantic, in ways orthogonal to Rust.
- dsego 2y ago
  > Zig: Trust the programmer to manually manage memory, but not to clean up unused variables. That's such a good tagline, actually one of the things that annoyed me with zig as well. The other one is the lack of attention to syntax aesthetics and ergonomics, it's a bit all over the place and I am also not fond of semicolons.
- do_not_redeem 2y ago
  The worst part is if you have an unused variable the compiler won't even show you the real errors until you fix all the warnings first. > Compile error: This variable of type `Foo` is unused Ok then, I'll just remove that, and... > Compile error: This function you're calling expects an argument of type `Foo` Just kill me.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  "Let me comment this line out" "Oh and I have to do this one too" "Oh and this five as well" "Almost there" "Nope"
gingerBill 2y ago
I am the creator of the Odin programming language. That's not even my opinion... I do not personally use an LSP for my own personal reasons (I found I PERSONALLY was less productive with such tools). I am not against the concept of autocompletion tools like an LSP. If you are more productive using one, that is great!!! OLS exists but OLS is just not "official"—even if it is very good from what many people have told me. The only reason it is not official is that none of the core team worked on it, including myself. As for QoL tools? Of course we want these but our philosophy is make sure the foundations are brilliant first before half-arsing the tool built on top of the foundations.

melon_tusk 2y ago

The Zig-community is annoyingly political, whereas the Odin community and -creator focuses on technology.

cgh 2y ago
How is the Zig community political? I use the language but I’m not involved with the community at all.
- melon_tusk 2y ago
  Just follow Andrew Kelley on whatever platform he hasn't ragequit from these days.
  - poncho_romero 2y ago
    Please give us some examples
  - cgh 2y ago
    Andrew Kelley is just one guy and he’s allowed to express his own political opinions online, just as you are. What evidence is there that the community as a whole is “annoyingly political”?
dpatterbee 2y ago
There's no community in the world that isn't political. Perhaps the issue is actually just that you disagree with the politics that are popular there?
- melon_tusk 2y ago
  No, the "C community" and creators aren't making a political stance on things at all. Lua doesn't either. The Zig creator is very outspoken on political matters.
  - poncho_romero 2y ago