Once Jonathan Blow's Jai comes out next year, the language that inspired conception of both of these, Odin will likely have no chance competing on the marketing side of things with programmers and will be taken over by Jai, and Zig in a large extent as well. So the future of the language might not be as solid as it might seem and it might end up just as an internal tool for JangaFX, which is how it originated.
Having the "web stuff" can attract literally millions of developers whom can elevate the language into more stable and broadly used language. More documentation would become available, libraries, youtube videos, internet presence in general.
He also stated recently that he doesn't care too much about language design at a syntax level, or better said it's not his top focus as the overarching concepts are more important to him.
I think there is a chance that people may have a hard time to adopt to the language. His strong focus on gamedev will further cut down the audience. It will certainly draw a lot of attention but a massive adoption is highly questionable.
I haven’t heard this before. Do you have a source on this?
Here is a list with his videos where he goes from conception to something tangible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ&list=PLmV5I2fxai...
The first video is from September 17, 2014.
Zig's first commit was Aug 5, 2015.
Odin has first commit in Jul 7, 2016.
Zig doesn't have interfaces as a language level feature. It uses manually implemented vtables and wrapper methods.
You can do the same in Odin with wrapper functions around a vtable.
A lot of programmers these days want static dispatch for its ergonomic value and Odin doesn't help you there. Odin thinks we should suck it up and write alligator_lay_egg_on(gator, egg, location) not gator.lay_egg_on(egg, location)
If we decide we'd prefer to type gator->lay_egg_on(egg, location) then Odin charges us for a vtable in our Alligator type, which we didn't need or want, and then we incur a stall every time we call that because we need to go via the vtable.
Odin is explicitly made for video games.
> Is Odin “just” a language for game development? # > No. It is a common misconception that Odin is “just” for game development (“gamedev”) due to the numerous vendor packages that could be used in the aid of the development of a game. However, gamedev is pretty much the most wide domain possible where you will do virtually every area of programming possible. > > Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc. > > There are many aspects of Odin which do make working with 2D and 3D related operations (which are common in gamedev) much nicer than other languages, especially Odin’s array programming, swizzling, #soa data types, quaternions and matrices, and so much more niceties which other languages do not offer out-of-the-box.
Ginger Bill vehemently refuses this notion and tries to fight in every podcast, to "sell" Odin as general purpose low level language. But he is failing because of my points and your claim just proves it yet again that Odin has profiled itself as language for games when in reality that was never the intention of Bill. There is nothing wrong with that, it's just the perception among programmers.
Games are art. The key thing is that you have to actually make it. Handmade encourages people who might make some art to actually make something rather than being daunted by the skill needed for a very sophisticated technology. Handmade is like telling a would-be photographer "You already have a camera on your phone. Point it at things and take pictures of them" rather than "Choose your subject, then you will need to purchase either an SLR or maybe a larger camera, and suitable lenses and a subscription for Photoshop and then take a college course in photo composition"
I don't want to use a text editor made by someone who has no idea what they're doing and learned about rope types last week. A dozen handmade text editors, most not as good as pico, are of no value to anybody.
But I do want to play video games by people who have no idea what they're doing. That's what Blue Prince is, for example. A dozen handmade video games means a dozen chances for an entirely unprecedented new game. It'll be rough around the edges, but novelty is worth a lot.
And what exactly is a "video game" language? A language that's low level and can do fast maths? Almost all commercial games are written in C++, but no one calls that a "game" language...
But in short, my hypothesis is because the Odin compiler bundles many graphics-related packages but does not bundle with an official http package, it is therefore "only" for games. He has no idea what games actually involve to make, and it is the most accidental compliment he could give. And we already have an FAQ answer for this: https://odin-lang.org/docs/faq/#is-odin-just-a-language-for-...
Odin does share a lot of similarities to Go, even including it's distinct type system. So requiring more type casting than your Go code is actually a surprise to me because Odin's rules a little more lax than Go's, but it's probably because you don't cast as often in Go for whatever reason, probably because it's not actually a systems-programming language, it's mostly just for web stuff. You're not actually dealing with different sized integers and floats all the time, you're just using `int` and `float64` in Go. If you had to use more, you'd actually realize Go requires even more casts than Odin.
Odin does lack methods BY DESIGN. It is not a design flaw, like you are thinking it is. And adding methods is not a "no-brainer", or you could argue adding them is a "no-brainer" as in you are not thinking about the consequences of them. We have a FAQ section on this topic entirely, so I won't copy and paste it here: https://odin-lang.org/docs/faq/#but-really-why-does-odin-not...
As for the other stuff you are complaining about: they're just libraries...
Odin is going to get an _official_ http package soon, and it has been in the works for a long time. It's going to be based on the native kernel async APIs (IOCP, io_uring, KQueue, etc), and from our preliminary tests, is a heck of a lot faster than any of approaches done with Go (and even many of the Rust approaches too).
There is a reason that I "vehemently [refuse] this notion and [try] to fight in every podcast" that Odin is only for games. You're literally saying because the official Odin compiler lacks a single official library (`core:net/http` which is in works as I said) for dealing with http, it isn't for web dev? Are you actually serious? There are third party libraries that already do this, but as I said, we are working on an official one already, which will be coming out this year for definite.
I highly recommend reading the following FAQ question to regarding the entirety of 'Is Odin "just" a language for game development?": https://odin-lang.org/docs/faq/#is-odin-just-a-language-for-...
But saying it is for gamedev is the most accidental compliment you could give it be gamedev is pretty much the most wide domain possible where you will do virtually every area of programming possible. All your comment told me is that you have no idea what gamedev actually involves.
PS: I just read a funny comment on YT video: "Odin feels like a DSL for writing games masquerading as a systems language."