Understanding the Odin programming language

by AlexeyBrin • 11 days ago

164 145 11 days ago

pseudony3• 10 days ago

Having fun with this.

Never bought into rust (have studied, have a (mostly AI-generated app in rust).

Wrote some Zig but Odin is even less overhead for me. I first loved Zigs built-in build system but having tried to wrap/use C libraries from both, I must say I prefer Odin. Wrapping some sqlite 3 API’s for my first little Odin program - just because I need so little of the API that it seems easier this way - and speaking to C from Odin is a pleasure.

That is, imho, where Rust fails the most - the second part is the C++’ish approach to memory management (RAII) - that’s not how systems programming or games (I’m told) tend to work.

To each their own. I had some fun with Rust too, but for me, Odin seems the most appealing :)

CyberDildonics25• 10 days ago

That is, imho, where Rust fails the most - the second part is the C++’ish approach to memory management (RAII) - that’s not how systems programming or games (I’m told) tend to work.

What does this mean? Who told you that?

dustbunny• 10 days ago

Casey Muratori and Jon Blow have pushed this concept frequently.

They largely don't deeply elaborate, which is sad because I am a professional game developer who is interested in precisely presented knowledge so I can apply it to my work.

My interpretation is that games want to allocate large pools of resources, like GPU buffers, cpu memory, etc, and reuse that memory over and over. Ie: Reinitialize it.

In my experience, RAII is my preferred pattern for certain things (std::lock_guard), and you can almost certainly express the majority of these "uber game dev patterns" using RAII/smart pointers/etc, but the c++ implementation of these "uber game dev patterns" tends to be more complicated (and imo esthetically ugly) compared to really well written C.

These new languages (zig, odin, jai) appear to be attempts to improve C to allow an alternative to C++ that doesn't have the ugly baggage that C++ has.

moron4hire2• 10 days ago

Yeah, that's weird. I first learned about RAII from professional game developers at gamedev.net.

pseudony3• 10 days ago

Games ? Many have talked about it, but many also make their games work inside of Unity and so on, so, depends on the project.

My angle is systems programming, and there, it absolutely matter. If you are performance sensitive, then you try to avoid crossing the user-space -> kernel boundary more than you have to.

Eg, ask for lots of memory, manage with arenas.

Interestingly Odin and Zig both lean into this heavily. Rust went a different route but has tried later to bolt on pluggable allocators.

frizlab2• 10 days ago

Did you try Swift? Its interoperability with C (and even C++) is great IMHO.

hollowturtle• 10 days ago

It's GC

hkalbasi• 10 days ago

If the major obstacle for adopting Rust is C interop, you may find my project CO2[1] appealing. It helps you to define C crates, `#include` C headers, while exporting a Rust API with Rust types in your crate boundary.

[1] https://github.com/hkalbasi/co2

Razengan• 10 days ago

This was a pretty funny video for a language launch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLPAqXi9In0

andyfilms15• 10 days ago

I've been using Odin for about 6 months now, and to be honest, it's hard to find fault with it. I've used it for STM32 microcontroller firmware, web and desktop applications, and all are performant and compile quickly.

My one issue is (and I'm fully aware it will never happen) I do wish there was some sort of first-class solution to inheritance. I've grown to love procedural programming, but some problems really are just better solved with a more OOP approach. Just because classes exist does not mean they need to be used.

But as far as a language to "get stuff done" with as few tradeoffs as possible, Odin is about as good as I can imagine a language being.

clumsysmurf• 10 days ago

I'd like to hear more about Odin + STM32 MCU firmware, do you have any good resources? I'm also curious how difficult it may be to using it with ESP32 (ESP-IDF) / RP2350.

andyfilms15• 10 days ago

You can look at my repo here: https://github.com/MadlyFX/odin-embedded-boilerplate

I don't believe Xtensa (ESP32) is supported yet, but people have been asking for it, so it may happen at some point. ARM is well supported now though, obviously.

RetroTechie2• 10 days ago

Out of curiosity:

In your opinion, could a minimal system to develop in Odin be squeezed into a device like the one(s) you targeted?

That's assuming maybe some tweaks to the toolset, doing without some niceties, but not cutting core features out of the language.

Asking 'cause I have a passing interest in programming languages that allow for native development on really small implementations (think sub-1MB on bare metal). The list of candidates doesn't seem long.

andyfilms15• 10 days ago

Odin is not like JS or something where you'd need a VM or transpilation process to target an embedded system. It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures, there's no "squeezing" required. You just compile for the target you want to run on.

Here's a UI framework, if you scroll down you'll see it on a Raspi Pico: https://github.com/MadlyFX/Ansuz

christophilus3• 10 days ago

I’d be interested in reading about your experience building web applications with it. Last I looked, its stdlib didn’t have great support for that.

sarchertech4• 10 days ago

There’s an official http package coming out and native tls support as well.

pjmlp7• 10 days ago

Personally, I have a certain Turbo Pascal feeling while playing around with it, yep I am aware of the influences.

datakan2• 10 days ago

I wonder when we'll see new languages created specifically with LLM's in mind.

xqb64• 10 days ago

What would that look like?

datakan2• 10 days ago

I don't know but I would imagine there are a lot of inefficiencies in modern languages from an LLM perspective that it could strip out, reduce token costs, improve speed etc.

moron4hire2• 10 days ago

An LLM-only oriented language doesn't make sense, because without human generated training data there is nothing for the model to learn from.

But if a human-oriented language were to be designed to also be better for LLMs, I think it would involve deeply expressive syntax that can succinctly but distinctly represent a very broad set of common operations. Succinct so context can be managed well, distinct so completions don't confuse one thing for another, broad so as much "reasoning" can be taken away from the LLM as possible. An anti-C. A new take on the goals of Java and Go to be languages that protect the application from the Junior Developers You're Likely To Hire.

I somewhat think it would also involve application state images ala Smalltalk. LLMs seem okay at generating small deltas. Many deltas sequenced together invites compounding error. LLM generated apps are unlikely to lead to common libraries being compentized and extracted out of the application to share with other applications; it seems like LLM code generation is already a "married to a specific project" act already. So, having a living state image might reveal some benefits by leaning into incrementally developing the application in situ, as a whole.

skitsofrandom• 10 days ago

I would guess a good way to implement a language meant for LLMs would be to strip out as many features as possible, so that all programs needed to be composed of just a handful of common structures written in shorthand. As much compiletime enforcement as possible. Maybe human-crafted abstractions for more error-prone concepts like multithreading that limit how they can be used in the language but provide ample, testable bumpers.

It would be interesting to design some mechanism where an external actor could program extensions into the language easily, which then would become a new black-box tool that an LLM could program with. Ideally though, I think you want to remove as much agency in reimplementation and re-abstraction as possible from the LLM. This is really just some tier above current high level languages, with as much dumbing down as possible.

I'm not sure this is really necessary or would even be effective because there wouldn't be a million examples for the training data of an LLM. But I imagine something along these lines could make an LLM more productive and token efficient.

lioeters• 10 days ago

I think it would be better to approach it from the other side, the priority is not to design a language for LLMs but a language more suitable for humans to think with. And not a natural language like English, which is inconsistent and allows illogical formulations, but something like Esperanto or Interlingua (Latino sine flexione). Something that is based on mathematics and logic at the bottom, like Lean, with enough abstraction layers for a person to be able to "speak" with the machine intuitively.

leecommamichael3• 10 days ago

We’ve seen several already, just search it.

pjmlp7• 10 days ago

The way forward will be more focused on formal specifications kind of approach, and there are already a few attempts at it.

gcanyon• 10 days ago

I wonder if this will help them get a wikipedia page. (not sure whether this comment is a joke or serious...)

leecommamichael3• 10 days ago

It would, but the book has existed for a while now, which is a good thing for anyone looking to learn Odin. The author, Karl, has had time to polish and update the text. He has his own Discord and is also available in the Odin Discord and makes helpful posts there as well.

ant6n• 10 days ago

Kinda wanna know why I should learn this language. Unfortunately there’s no wiki entry (deleted with some controversy abut notability), so it’s hard to get the gist of it.

kulkalkul• 10 days ago

Odin overview is great resource for getting a quick gist (and learning the language as a bonus): https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/

But mainly, language doesn't have a special gimmick. The main idea (imo) is it is opinionated to have defaults to cater for majority of the cases. So once you get used to it, it is pleasure to write C-like code in it.

WalterBright• 10 days ago

Oooodiiinn!

https://youtu.be/ZqJHqXERslM?t=59

phplovesong• 10 days ago

Promoting here on HN is not usually allowed. This is a paid tutorial for some obscure programming language.

AlexeyBrin• 9 days ago

I have no connection with the book author. Also, people post all the time links to paid sources on HN (like books, software or pay for services).

Understanding the Odin programming language

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