Understanding the Odin Programming Language

by dsego • 2 years ago

159 97 2 years ago

I just started “Build Your Own Text Editor”[0], but using Odin instead of C. So far, I’m impressed with Odin. It’s the most ergonomic C replacement I’ve tried. I wish it had been around 25 years ago when I was professionally working with unmanaged code.

[0] https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/index.html

blame-troi• 2 years ago

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?

dartos5• 2 years 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.

melon_tusk3• 2 years ago

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

cultofmetatron2• 2 years ago

any word on this coming out in pdf? thats the version I strongly prefer for my ebooks

jmacklin308• 2 years ago

While not a first class solution, the EPUB version of the book converts to PDF fairly well (I'm not noticing anything wrong). There are plenty of tools to do so.

johnisgood3• 2 years ago

I believe the issue is that things are not properly formatted, and does not look as good as it could. For text-only, EPUB is fine, otherwise I would rather prefer PDF, too.

tasuki• 2 years ago

Curious, why? I hate pdfs because of their fixed size. Whatever device I happen to use to view a pdf, it's always got a different size than I'd like... either too large (ok I can fix that by zooming out!), wrong proportions, or too small...

cultofmetatron2• 2 years ago

I like that it looks like the print book. I have dual screen and when it comes to tech books. I few the pdf fullscreen on one monitor while trying things out actively on another. when I'm on the go, it looks great on a ipad.

for novels where I'm reading for story, I use a kindle but for textbooks, I strongly prefer pdf

karl_zylinski3• 2 years ago

Hi, author here!

The HTML version can be "printed to PDF".

There is no "manually layouted" PDF available however. That requires manual typesetting the whole book, which is weeks or months of extra work. I will do that if I ever make it into a physical book. At that point an official PDF would also become available.

That said, many of my readers like having the HTML version in a window next to their code window. I think it is the best experience on a computer. On the iPad I would probably read the EPUB. But if you prefer PDF, then print the HTML version to PDF.

Have a nice day! /Karl Zylinski

unwind• 2 years ago

This looks really nice and the prose had a positive/easy-going feel to it.

When the actual code examples begin, the very first couple of lines confused me:

    package hellope

    import "core:fmt"

Is the quoting of package names optional?

argiopetech• 2 years ago

Based on the official website[0], it would appear the package name is necessarily not quoted.

This doesn't strike me as odd at all. It's an identifier, not a string. The quoting of the import, on the other hand...

[0] https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/

im_dario• 2 years ago

It looks like some borrowed Go convention, where package statements don't need to be quoted, but import statements may include URLs and, therefore, they are expected to be quoted.

gingerBill9• 2 years ago

As the docs do state, the package declaration has nothing to do with the import path. The package name is there for consistent ABI, so that the link names are prefixed with that. The import _path_ is just that, a path to where the package is stored. They can be different but it is conventional that they are similar-ish.

haspok2• 2 years ago

A floating point number is a method for storing decimal numbers...

I'm sorry, what?

ComSubVie• 2 years ago

What do you mean? It's exactly that in almost any programming language.

What is it you don't understand: "method" (a representation) or "decimal" (a number that consists of a whole and a fractional part)?

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Maybe OP reacted because a float only looks like it is a way to store decimal numbers, when it's only an approximation of decimal numbers. If you really need decimal numbers you need something like mpmath¹.

As a shorthand to explain what a float is to someone, "a decimal number" is an OK start though.

But sometimes that approximation breaks down even for simple examples, i.e. 0.1 cannot be represented as a float. This can be quite unexpected if your mental model is that "floats are decimal numbers with a certain precision".

1: https://mpmath.org/

haspok2• 2 years ago

You cannot represent an arbitrary or fixed precision decimal number in a floating point format. Or to put it in another way:

"Most decimal fractions cannot be represented exactly as binary fractions." - from the Python tutorial

The word "decimal" does not simply mean "a number that consists of a whole and a fractional part".

bajsejohannes• 2 years ago

I agree with OP that it's unnecessarily confusing. A "method" is a procedure. The floating point number is the result of that procedure, not the procedure itself.

"Decimal" implies a ten based system, even though it's perfectly fine to say "binary decimal".

Using your own replacement words, it would be clearer to write "A floating point number is a representation of a number with a fractional part".

dismalaf5• 2 years ago

Some programming languages differentiate between floats and decimals. But yeah, for laypeople, a float is a decimal.

3836293648• 2 years ago

Very few numbers have decimals. They're not just numbers with whole and fractional parts, decimals are base 10 as well. .NET has them for monetary uses but I'm unaware of any other language(family) that has them built in.

jdiff• 2 years ago

It may not be precise in its details but it's a very accessible explanation that's certainly "good enough." Maybe you could swap it in for "non-whole numbers" and still be reasonably accessible, but that's also not perfectly accurate since integers are stored just fine inside a float.

I'm certainly not going to fault them for using layman terms when addressing laymen.

tialaramex• 2 years ago

Ideally for this work you want somebody who is capable of communicating in a way that doesn't feel dumbed down and yet also isn't actively wrong. This explanation of the floating point types does not hit that mark. I'm not in the market for an Odin book, so in some sense it doesn't matter what I think, but across fields it's better if what you're saying is able to both serve its immediate purpose and actually true.

People are going to remember (some of) what you taught them and even if it felt peripheral at the time they may have centred it. When they return to this teaching again, it's not surprising that they assume you meant what you said, even if in your mind it was figurative or targeted at a superficial understanding of the subject.

Decimal representations do exist in machines. Representations that can manage 1.2 exactly but can't handle a third, or pi, or the square root of 2 for example. But the floating point numbers aren't that, they're a weird (but useful) binary fraction and if we're going to mention them at all we need to make it clear what's going on here.

For example the "float" (32-bit IEEE floating point type) called 1.2 is actually 5033165 divided by 4194304 which isn't actually six over five (1.2) but it's pretty close.

karl_zylinski3• 2 years ago

Hi, author here! I will update the book with a few clarifications surrounding my sloppy use of the word "decimal". As some have pointed out it is a bit of a "layman way" to view things, but nevertheless the reader should be made aware of whenever I use sloppy / simplified language.

sklerk• 2 years ago

I love Odin, and I'm glad to see it getting more attention. I've been working through Dave Churchill's COMP 4300 course[0] in Odin/Raylib rather than C++/SFML, and it's been a blast.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_xRyXins84_Sq7yZkxGP...

raoulj• 2 years ago

Flipped through the language overview on the website and noticed that matrices are limited in how large they can be because they're stack allocated [1]. Ergonomics of the language otherwise look solid but for my use case that would be fairly constraining

[1] https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#technical-information-o...

fuhsnn2• 2 years ago

Looks like this is implemented with LLVM's builtin matrix type, also available as a Clang extension: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MatrixTypes.html

gingerBill9• 2 years ago

Actually we implement it manually ourselves the exact same way that the extensions work. This is because we have to support multiple different versions of LLVM which don't have those extensions.

amjoshuamichael2• 2 years ago

Matrices, like any other primitive data type, are stack-allocated. Do you want matrices to be allocated on the heap? If you're looking to do Pandas-style data science, you'd have to write your own implementation, where you could adjust for exactly how you want to do the multiplication. The builtin matrices are typically pretty small (~4x4 or 3x3), a very common use case in graphics or games programming.

nkrisc2• 2 years ago

Any reading recommendations for introduction to the fundamentals of manual memory management specifically? I tried learning C in the past but didn’t get very far without a compelling need to learn it.

I’ve toyed with Odin a bit and the language in syntax is right up my alley, but the idea of manually managing memory is pretty foreign to me. I understand it broadly, but have no good idea about how to actually do it practically and properly.

I will give this book a look as well since I see it covers the topic in some chapters.

FullGarden_S4• 2 years ago

Any reading recommendations for introduction to the fundamentals of manual memory management specifically

here is a series written by the creator of Odin programming language about memory allocation https://www.gingerbill.org/series/memory-allocation-strategi...

The core:mem package in standard library is a very great resource for memory management in Odin. The standard library's basically got it all.

nkrisc2• 2 years ago

Thank you, I’d missed that!

amjoshuamichael2• 2 years ago

Odin has a builtin heap allocator that works the same way you would expect any other high-level language to do memory allocation–it's just that you have to free the memory yourself. Plus, Odin's built in `context` system makes it really easy to change what kind of allocator is used for different sections of code. For my use cases, I've never needed any more than a heap and an arena, detailed in this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZNd5FjSquk

Personally, my large Odin project uses a series of arrays to store specific data, and then everything else is stored in a temporary allocator, which is wiped between frames. Besides some graphics initialization & path resolution at initialization time, the heap allocator is never used. I never really have to worry about memory. That's similar to the design detailed in this talk by Ryan Fluery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ5a3gCCZYo

Odin also has a tracking allocator which can be used to check for leaks or double frees. In debug mode, my program will print out all un-freed memory left after shutdown. If you're working outside of Odin, I've heard good things about Valgrind for C/C++:

https://valgrind.org/

EternalFury3• 2 years ago

The door for new languages is rapidly closing; unless you are a craftsman and dilettante.

rixed2• 2 years ago

Who's closing the door?

EternalFury3• 2 years ago

I should have explained my reasoning.

AI coding assistants are closing the door. They need a lot of training data to be good and useful. Established programming languages have a tremendous amount of that, so AI coding agents will do a good job there. C, PHP, Python, Java, etc.

Garden variety and new programming languages have much less examples in the wild, so AI assistants will do a lesser job with those, unless their lineage leads to one of the established languages.

Finally, the bulk of future developers will be lured to AI assisted coding and therefore won’t generate much training data for new programming languages.

A vicious circle.

All of the above is speculation on my part, obviously. Maybe AI assistants will get smart enough to master languages they have not been trained on.

lenerdenator• 2 years ago

Does the compiler log an error if you try to compile a line of code with more than one "i" in it?

sriram_malhar2• 2 years ago

Can someone with Odin experience tell me about a new feature? I'm looking for a unique hook, like Zig did with comptime.

goodpaul6• 2 years ago

I don’t think it’s trying to have some magical hook, it just feels better to program than C/C++ for most of their use cases.

That being said, I find the error handling via multiple return values + or_return pretty nifty, and the vendored libraries give it a very “batteries-included” feel.

For example, you can render hardware accelerated graphics and de/serialize JSON without downloading any packages.

gingerBill9• 2 years ago

I am the creator of the Odin programming language but Odin doesn't have a "killer feature". The lack of a "killer feature" does mean it is a very weird language to market for (see: https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2024/09/08/odin-weird-to-...), but to summarize that article, Odin isn't trying to be hypeable, it's trying to be an extremely productive language for people looking for a C alternative for high performance modern systems.

sriram_malhar2• 2 years ago

Fair enough. The reason I asked is there are many languages that aim to fill the gap that Odin fills (Nim, Zig, Crystal). My use of the word "hook" wasn't meant in the sense of "killer feature"; it is some vague sense of what people believe should excite me to take a detailed look at the language spec.

For example, I'd say "If you are a python programmer, you should take a look at Nim. Same syntax, automatic memory management, fast execution, and meta programming".

For crystal, it would be the same set, except for the syntax (which resembles Ruby)

Anyhoo, having read some more about Odin, I'll attempt an answer to my own question. These are the features -- the hooks -- that stood out from the competition for me

1. Array programming on fixed sized arrays. Very nice. 2. quaternion and matrix in-built types. This alone is worth the price 3. "where" clauses including numeric constraints on types (in parametric polymorphism) 4. relatively pain-free linking to C code of admission. 5. Small arrays for dynamically sized stack allocated arrays 6. Multiple return values that can be named.

Consider me hooked! Thank you for all the hard work and sharing it generously with the world.

fithisux2• 2 years ago

Do you know if odin can be used instead of C? For example driver or kernel development? Windows for example?

karl_zylinski3• 2 years ago

There's a blog post here about using Odin for making operating system: https://flysand7.hashnode.dev/writing-an-os-kernel-in-odin

fithisux2• 2 years ago

Thank you very much.

kalekold• 2 years ago

I'm not particularly impressed by Odin but maybe i'm not the audience. If you like strictly procedural languages (or a die hard C fan) it's probably fine but it feels like a 'My First Language™' kind of project.

What I really miss are methods on structs a'la Go. Just simple receivers would be a great addition imho. Because of this choice, it's affected the entire stdlib and boy does it look old. Creating a typed variable to pass it to a stdlib init function (for allocation, etc) is terrible decision and it's everywhere. The stdlib looks muddled too.

Odin is obviously heavily inspired by Go (among others) but it's learned nothing of the lessons of the Go authors. For example, Odin is a larger language and has fewer features.

I got an ICE while compiling once and it reported something like `TODO(bill) support this`. Not a good look.

gingerBill9• 2 years ago

Thank you for your comment.

Odin isn't trying to be "impressive", it's trying to be productive as an alternative for C on modern systems.

Odin isn't my "First Language" and closer to my 20th.

Odin is just not for you. Your complaint about the lack of methods means you don't want a C alternative, and that is absolutely fine. I have nothing inherently against methods but I believe that if you are to add them, you cannot just have _mere methods_ but also have something to take advantage of them. But by the time you need such a feature (like typeclasses/traits), it becomes far from being a C alternative now and being something closer in the realm of Rust.

And what about the core library is muddled?

What lessons from Go did I not learn?—I'll take "fewer features" as a compliment too.

I got an ICE while compiling once and it reported something like `TODO(bill) support this`. Not a good look.

Did you make an issue for this? And how long ago was this? Because this most likely fixed/implement now, and was probably fixed very quickly too.

thag12• 2 years ago

i think you probably just aren't the audience. most of the things you miss are things i either am neutral on or actually enjoy (having written about ~20K lines of odin).

the creating a variable and passing to the `init` procedure is something i actually like since it allows me to decouple my allocations and initializations in most cases (barring things that are backed by dynamic arrays like `core:container/queue`). it also ensures that the memory allocated by `init` procedures can outlive the structure that it was tied to, which is especially useful in the case of something like the string builder.

if you simply want "method-style" autocomplete (i'm neutral on that), ols also does support that with `fake_method_completion` where you type `<variable>.<whatever>` and all procedures that take a `T` or `^T` as the first parameter show up as options.

as far as having fewer features, i think it just depends on which ones you're talking about. imo, the odin generic system is much nicer to work with and the presence of real enums, bit_sets, enumerated arrays, `or_return` + friends, and a proper scoped-based defer (instead of go's function based) make it really nice to program in compared to go for me. that being said, the `core:thread` `Thread_Pool` is not a complete replacement for goroutines and i will say that the concurrency model of go works really well for a garbage-collected language. of course, the garbage-collected part there shows why something like goroutines don't really fit well in odin.

on internal compiler errors, unfortunately, in a pre-1.0 language, those are bound to happen. fortunately, the time to fix can often be measured in a matter of hours rather than days/weeks.

gingerBill9• 2 years ago

Regarding internal compiler errors, I still hit on in MSVC every other month, and that's a compiler that has been in production for many decades at this point.

But as I said to him, did he file an issue and when was this? Because it was probably fixed by now, and if not, we'll try to fix it straightaway.

baranul• 2 years ago

Odin appears to only recently have been pressing the claim of Go alternative, as a new direction in its marketing hype. There are Go and Pascal influences, but Odin is arguably much more similar to and an alternative of Jai[1][2] (from Jon Blow). Maybe the strategy is to try to distance itself from the label of Jai-clone or Jai-lite.

If Jai goes public beta or releases books (upcoming from Ivo Balbaert), then Jai has the potential to kill off Odin, which appears to only been able to keep a smallish following (relatively fewer GitHub stars and lack of Wikipedia page) since its birth in 2015 or 2016. Odin's popularity, seems dependent on Jai not being public yet.

The languages which are truly close to Go, are: Go+ (goplus)[3], V (vlang)[4], and Borgo[5]. V has the methods on structs, as you have mentioned. Go+ and Borgo compile to Go. V compiles to C, along with other backend options, and has a Go2V transpiler. These languages are more of an evolution of Go, that provide additional features and functionality, and where the influence is much more obvious.

[1] https://github.com/Jai-Community/Jai-Community-Library/wiki

[2] https://youtu.be/M763xHjsPk4 (Jai vs Odin)

[3] https://goplus.org

[4] https://vlang.io

[5] https://borgo-lang.github.io (note- weird issues over lack of license)

Understanding the Odin Programming Language

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