I've been messing around with Odin and Raylib for a few weeks. I've been interested in trying Raylib for a long time, it has a huge list language bindings. I chose Odin for different reasons than I think many would. Perhaps superficial reasons.
I'm a game-play programmer and not really into memory management or complex math. I like things to be quick and easy to implement. My games are small. I have no need for custom allocators or SOA. All I want is a few thousand sprites at ~120fps. I normally just work in the browser with JS. I use Odin like it's a scripting language.
I really like the dumb stuff like... no semicolons at the end of lines, no parentheses around conditionals, the case statement doesn't need breaks, no need to write var or let, the basic iterators are nice. Having a built in vector 2 is really nice. Compiling my tiny programs is about as fast as refreshing a browser page.
I also really like C style procedural programing rather than object oriented code, but when you work in a language that most people use as OO, or the standard library is OO, your program will end up with mixed paradigms.
It's only been a few weeks, but I like Odin. It's like a statically typed and compiled scripting language.
I don't mean to promote it because the nature programming language version 0.5 is not ready yet, but the nature programming language https://github.com/nature-lang/nature basically meets your expectations, except for the use of var to declare variables, probably because I also really like simplicity.
Here's an example of how I use the nature and raylib bindings.
That's one of the best intro pages I've seen for a language. I really like how it has tabs for different practical examples (http, generics, coroutine, etc.).
Looks ergonomic enough at first sight. The important thing for new languages is mindshare, so keep at it, post a Show HN when you feel it’s ready and perhaps it’ll pick up steam.
(Personally I have spent my weekend evaluating C-like languages and I need a break and to reset my palate for a bit)
I like this aspect about Odin. It doesn't try to fundamentally solve any new problems. Instead it does many things right. So it becomes hard to say "this is why you should use Odin". It's more like, try it for yourself and see if you like it :)
I'm a game-play programmer and not really into memory management or complex math. I like things to be quick and easy to implement. My games are small. I have no need for custom allocators or SOA. All I want is a few thousand sprites at ~120fps. I normally just work in the browser with JS. I use Odin like it's a scripting language.
I really like the dumb stuff like... no semicolons at the end of lines, no parentheses around conditionals, the case statement doesn't need breaks, no need to write var or let, the basic iterators are nice. Having a built in vector 2 is really nice. Compiling my tiny programs is about as fast as refreshing a browser page.
I also really like C style procedural programing rather than object oriented code, but when you work in a language that most people use as OO, or the standard library is OO, your program will end up with mixed paradigms.
It's only been a few weeks, but I like Odin. It's like a statically typed and compiled scripting language.