alt Hacker NewsAnother language that is in a similar space to Zig that I think deserves more attention, particularly for funding is Odin. While I think Zig is a great language, there is a consistency of design and simplicity to Odin that makes low-level programming more ergonomic and enjoyable to me. While Zig boasts a lot of impressive projects, Odin was used to build the JangaFX suite[1].
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Appreciate Odin, especially the batteries included approach (simple to use structure of arrays, matrices, array programming, the context system for custom allocators, ...). To be fair though: the heavy lifting in JangaFX is likely done by a ton of C++ code, it being high performance real time graphics programming.
I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).
Ginger Bill, the Odin language developer, is openly hostile against package managers (he wrote a post called "Package Managers Are Evil") so he maintains his own wrappers of popular C libraries in vendor folder next to the compiler. That doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me.
I think zig is also highly opinionated but it always seemed to me that Andrew started from solid pillars and made an excellent job of carefully considering each feature that was added to the language:
- No hidden control flow.
- No hidden memory allocations.
- No preprocessor, no macros.
Odin on the other hand is just some developer's personal taste marketed as "Programming Done Right". So, if you disagree with any choice Bill made, you're not doing programming right.