Discussion summary
Odin 1.0 was announced with mixed reactions; some users criticized the video presentation and questioned its reliability, while others discussed its relation to Jai and other Odin versions.
What the discussion says
- Some found the Odin announcement video low quality and uninformative.
- There is debate about Odin's similarities to Jai and its future after Jai's release.
- Concerns about Odin's credibility due to the source and copying from other announcements.
“a random video that some ginger dude put up on youtube doesn't seem like a reliable source.”
“Honest question: Are you making a joke? Because while it objectively could be one, it doesn't sound like one.”
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- Hacker News
- Bad video, I noped out after 2 mins, it is annoying and has a very low information density. Anyone uses a yt video -> information service that is fast, free, reliable etc?by bmacho
- Free tier of Google Gemini can summarize and let you ask questions about pasted YT links.by jug
- Not to be confused with Samsung Odin[1], or ODIN (Open Disk Imager in a Nutshell)[2], or Odin for OS/2 Warp[3]...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin_(firmware_flashing_softwa...
by d3Xt3r - I read through Odin's FAQ and didn't get the picture of what it does better than everyone else. I think it's missing a good short pitch.by viktorcode
- Why not start with the home page? It provides a good overview and covers all the important points:
* The Data-Oriented Language for Sane Software Development.
* Odin is the C alternative for the Joy of Programming.
* Simplicity, High Performance, For Modern Systems
If you don't see value in these points, you are not part of the target audience.
by CyMonk - Odin looks very Go like, oddly it did the same design flaw, and forgot about proper error handling, and it seems to also do the same mistake zig did, and use llvm (so you get those nice 20min compile times). Odin also seem to lack adts?
I guess a gamedev niche language can fly with these restrictions, but for a new general purpose langauge these are a must have.
by phplovesong - There's something seriously off about this ginger bill guy. In addition to copying most of Odin from Jai, Bill copied Jon Blows announcement to his announcement as well as the fake surprised "oh I didn't see you there" opening for the real announcement. He's also planning to release the language the exact same time as Jai, and even said "after ten years of hard work its finally here."
Any one of those things you could ignore, but all of them together and its starting to be weird.
by luxorious - What would you say is similar between Odin and Jai? I briefly used Jai (I have never had access) and found that essentially only declaration syntax is familiar.
- There is also a strong argument about whether or not Odin can survive the public release of Jai. Which is rumored to be this year, but who knows if that will prove true.
Debatably, Odin's limited success, is due to Jai not being available to more of the public.
by baranul - I think both Bill and Jon have discussed this at length and are both mutually respectful of what problems each are trying to solve, could be wrong. At the least, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that Odin is "mostly copied" from Jai just because they have a few similarities and share inspirations.
See [1] where Bill discusses the influences and where they've diverged longer-form.
by devalexwells - > He's also planning to release the language the exact same time as Jai
Except that Odin has been "released" and has been used to ship software for years now. Regardless of Bill's inspirations for his language, I can write code with Odin right now, and that's a huge benefit compared to waiting for Blow to finally be in the mood to release Jai.
by Cyberdog - a random video that some ginger dude put up on youtube doesn't seem like a reliable source. any info on this from a reputable institution?
shame that HN can't meet the moderation quality bar set by wikipedia
- Honest question: Are you making a joke? Because while it objectively could be one, it doesn't sound like one.
The random ginger dude is the creator of Odin.
by 7bit - Clickbait video title, the first major release is going to be 2027 (date based versioning) (j/k).
Odin is a pretty neat language, I should play more with it. There's nothing outright wrong with it I can think of. Some things I would have done slightly different but they're all nitpicks (mainly having the context be a thread local so #contextless wouldn't be necessary).
- Regarding the implementation of Odin's `context` not being thread-local, source from here: https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2025/12/15/odins-most-mis...
Another common question I’ve gotten a few times is why the `context` is passed as an implicit pointer argument to a procedure, and not something like a thread local variable stack? The rationale being that there would not need to be a calling convention difference for `context`. Unfortunately through a lot of experimentation and thought, there are a few reasons why it is implemented the way it is:
* Easier to manage across LIB/DLL boundaries than trying to use a single thread-local stack
* Easier management of recovery from crashes where the context might be hard to figure out.
* Using the existing stack makes stack management easier already, you don’t need to have a separate allocator for that stack
* Some platforms do not thread-local variables (e.g. freestanding targets)
* Works better with async/fiber based things, which would then require a fiber-local stack instead of a thread-local one
* Prevent back-propagation, which would be trivial with a global/thread-local stack
Odin’s context also has copy-on-write semantics. This is done for two reasons: to keep things local, and prevent back-propagation of “bad” data from an third-party library (be it malicious or just buggy). So not having an easily accessible stack of context values makes it harder for this back-propagation to happen.
by gingerBill - I kind of like Odin, with its Pascal/Modula-2 influences, even if the community is a bit hardcore on some of their ideas.
Love the books in the background, and the whole video.
It is also nice that Odin takes the batteries included approach.
How well it would fair in the mainstream remains to be seen.
by pjmlp - Odin is not the only language with Pascal influences, as that applies to Golang and Vlang too.by baranul
- What kinds of project would Odin be best suited for, as compared to, say, Rust or Go?by bovermyer
- I've been using and loving Odin for probably around 5 years now, with this past couple years being more seriously invested in it. After tens of thousands of lines of code I'm still very happy. If you like C, but feel it's missing a few things, I highly recommend giving Odin a shot. Among the new litter of "better C" languages, Odin is easily the lowest-friction. It makes for a very nice experience. Congratulations, gingerBill.
- Agreed completely. It’s my favorite language in its class. I need to build something serious in it someday. So far, I’ve only used it for building personal tools.