The conversation

James_KHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I have long been aware of that particular user of Odin, after all the creators mention it frequently

I have long been aware of that particular user of Odin, after all the creators mention it frequently. The fact remains that the US government has warned against the use of languages such as Odin [1]. As such, it is competing in the extremely small niche of "languages best suited for embedded computing and operating systems". Suffice to say that most of its users likely do not use it for that. Finally there is the matter of trust. A while ago I was shopping around these new languages that have sprouted out of LLVM and watched a few talks from the creators of various languages. The Zig team were both ambitions and clear in their presentation. They gave me the impression of an experienced and motivated team. By contrast the Odin presentation I saw was utterly directionless and filled with fluff. I like to think I have a good nose for BS, and Odin trips it. That great wall of random corporate logos of companies which don't use Odin on their website doesn't help. …

Original discussionOdin, a pragmatic C alternative with a Go flavour128 source comments · at import
2

What was this responding to?

Parent context · original excerpt

BS
bsrkfHN

Seems needlessly harsh and also misplaced in some way. Zig is super non-ergonomic to any C-developer, and its explicitness at all costs is also non-C-like (meaning a rather big shift for someone actually liking C). Rust is a completely different beast altogether. Odin is a rather simple, performant, pragmatic, procedural language, fixing especially things in C with regards to its type system and infrastructure (such as packages), adding niceties such as `defer` while being at it. I, as a C programmer, have it far higher up my list of languages to try than Zig or Rust by a rather large margin. btw: "C alternative means a language that will last for 50 years" seems a snide that could be applied to any language less than 20 years old? I'm not sure what that's concretely meant to criticize here? Is Zig more a 50-year language than Odin, if so how? Odin is used for rather serious commercial p…

Full original

Community replies 0

No community replies yet. Add your perspective.

Replies from the source 2

Direct replies available in this import. Original-language excerpts.

MA
masfoobarHN

Just curious - which Odin talk are you referring to that shows it as "directionless anf filled with fluff" Also the company logos on the website are under "Companies who use products by JangaFX" but it probably should be in its own section.

Full original
DR
drannexHN

> The fact remains that the US government has warned against the use of languages such as Odin That goes for Zig as well. But, the NSA is only classifying based on most well-known languages, and additionally a lot of those aren't 'memory-safe' they just have GC, the reason they don't believe you should use C is because they don't have built in memory safety checks at all, whereas Odin does. They have Pascal on that list, which is a primary inspiration of Odin, and is also technically an unsafe language. > By contrast the Odin presentation I saw was utterly directionless and filled with fluff. I am not sure why a presentation has anything to do with performance or credibility of a language, plus I am always impressed by their talks. Good chance you saw their live coding/development sessions? They live stream development fairly often. > I like to think I have a good nose for BS, and Odin t…

Full original
Continue on Hacker News

Respect different perspectives. Share concrete experiences.

Sign in to post, reply, repost, and quote.