Comments by "gingerBill" (@GingerGames) on "Developer Voices" channel.

  1. Thank you for having me on! It was an absolute pleasure.
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  2. Thank you for watching the video. With regards to the "automagic C interop", this sounds cool until you realize this is actually pretty much NEVER what you want. In all of the cases you look at what Zig does, the libraries just wrap the automagically imported C calls, which is effectively the same amount of work as just writing the bindings manually, defeating the entire purpose of the automagical stuff. There is also the other issue that people use the C-preprocess as if it was the same language as C. They define constants and many wrapper functions and more, with the preprocessor, which will be missed by the "automagical" stuff. We are currently working on making an official automatic bindings generator, and because of Odin's amazing `foreign` system stuff, things can have little to no wrappers whatsoever, and still be extremely useful. Odin has tried its best to make binding with foreign code very pleasurable, whilst not requiring wrappers. See things like the attributes `link_prefix` or even `b32` types (for booleans which are not 1-byte) or `u32le` types (endian specific types) or multi-pointers `[^]T`. With a bindings generator, you'll have a lot more control about how you can interface with foreign (e.g. C) code.
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  3. Thank you so much for using it!
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  4. Rust cannot be a successor to C. Rust might be a successor to "Modern C++", but definitely not C since C programmers want a lot more control that Rust cannot by its very design offer. With regards to Zig, I recommend trying both Odin and Zig out and see which of the languages you actually prefer. There doesn't need to be a single "winner", this isn't Highlander.
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  5. Thank you for the insult :)
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  6. Two reasons: no other language has incorporated all of those ideas together into a coherent package; I am here to solve actual problems with tools/constructs/ideas/features I know and have been proven to work, rather than experiment with new ideas where it will most definitely fail.
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  7. As I say in the interview, try both of the languages out for at least a week each, and see which you prefer!
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  8. That's my actual (legal) name. I am "Ginger Bill". My actual name is just so generic, which would make it nigh impossible to search for on the internet.
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  9. Odin does have bounds checking any many other memory safety features, just like Zig.
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  10. If you don't understand why it is necessary to replace the declaration syntax of C, then you don't know the horrors of C itself. `char (*(*x())[5])()` is valid C syntax, now can you tell me what it is? If I rewrite in Odin as `x: proc() -> ^[5](proc() -> u8)`, it makes a hell of a lot more sense (declare x as a procedure returning a pointer to an array 5 of a procedure that returns u8). In Odin you read the declaration from left to right; in C you read it in the way it is used (which was a mistake, and anyone saying otherwise is even disagreeing with the creators of the C language).
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  11. Odin does have freestanding targets, but it we are not focusing on embedded systems for loads of reasons. Personally I believe embedded systems (whatever that even means, since it is such a broad category), needs a language tailored for its domain. More domain specific languages is what we need, not "generalized" languages which is not great for any specific domain.
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  12. ​ natescode Odin is just as "general purpose" as Zig, but we do provide a few libraries that are more "domain focused". We do not aim to replace C, especially since I do not believe this is possible. This is why we advertise ourselves as an "Alternative to C", rather than a "Replacement". C isn't one language, and is multiple languages depending on what target and compiler you use. It won't be replaced any time, but at least with have alternatives to choose from for our problems!
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  13. Nope. That's private. But Odin does have `vendor:microui` which you can use and modify to your heart's content.
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  14. Thank you for listening to the interview :)
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  15. People have already written Kernels in Odin. So yes you can write an OS with Odin.
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  16. Odin doesn't have header files!
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  17. What would like a presentation on? If you want a presentation of the language itself, I recommend watching one of my videos on Odin as a introduction, or just read the Overview on the website.
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  18. Something that is used in numerous commercial products is fictive just because the Wikipedia mods won't accept (nor state clearly why) the proposed Wikipedia article numerous people in the community has worked on?
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  19. You haven't contradicted anything I said---there are parts where it is nice to reduce redundant typing, but that is not necessarily the same as optimizing for it. . Mathematics has much terser syntax BECAUSE you are trying to compress a lot of information into symbols, and manipulate those symbols a lot. However with programming, you don't want it to be as terse because the constructs cannot be expressed as tersely, and we have the luxury of writing full words and phrases to be used as identifiers. A lot of problems I have seen in code have been from programmers with a big mathematical background, and they use really short (usually single letter) identifiers, which makes their code completely unreadable.
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  20. Odin and Zig are very similar in terms of age, and they have very different philosophies behind them. I don't disagree with the sentiment that people should learn C, but people who have been using C for a very long time do want something else, and languages like Odin and Zig are there to be of service.
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  21.  @TheMachina42 Odin isn't trying to replace C whatsoever. We just want to provide an alternative in the domains that Odin provides. Trying to replace C is never going to happen within a few decades, but at least providing new options/alternatives for other problems is a wonderful thing!
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  22.  @_-martin-_  I explained the issues with C's syntax and why everyone else tries to not deal with it. The closest language that you might like would be C3.
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  23.  @androth1502  what kind of "update"?
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  24. ​ jugeek It's been available since about a month after the M1 came out. I bought an M1 Mac Mini specifically to get Odin working on it.
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  25. Firstly, name a single platform that supports 128-bit floating point numbers in hardware?---that isn't an FPGA. Secondly, if you need more precision than 64-bits, you probably want "big floats" instead, because 128-bits is probably not enough.
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  26.  @DanielJoyce  so what are you referring to with regards to Zig in your original comment? Odin and Zig both use LLVM as their backend.
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  27. ​ @delibellus Exactly. There isn't a "single" solution to "all" problems. And thank goodness we have choice nowadays with regards to programming languages. 10 years ago, if you wanted an imperative procedural language with manual memory management, you pretty much only had C, C++, Fortran, or some Pascal variant. Now we have a huge selection of languages!
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  28. @doltBmB ​ @DeveloperVoices the concerns of other languages were considered very early on. Especially since a lot of the very early users of Odin were Scandinavian (just a coincidence). Things like := and ^ turned out not to be a problem in practice whatsoever. People always make these claims but rarely are issues in practice, and if they are, they are problems in the vast majority of programming languages.
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  29. We'd be interested in seeing if we can support a freestanding PowerPC platforms for Odin most definitely! Maybe some forms of Cortex-M (but it's too varied to be actually useful as a single generic target). As for MicroBlaze, you're probably the first person I've met in a long time to even use it still. Supporting these new platforms does take a bit work (LLVM isn't just magic, unfortunately) to get working, but we are not against supporting those platforms. We have just been focusing on the main application-oriented platforms (AMD64, ARM64, and now wasm), but that doesn't mean we cannot support other platforms.
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  30. ​ @Bebtelovimab there are lesser used languages on Wikipedia without specs on there and very few secondary sources. And a spec would be a primary source and still not enough. Yes, Wikipedia is that crazy.
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  31. Harvard is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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