Marketing the Odin Programming Language Is Weird

I thought the funding section was a little odd; I was under the impression that Bill was being paid by JangaFX to develop/maintain the language? But I think the corporate sponsorship of language development should be the norm. If existing languages are not sufficient to solve a business need, then they should pay for the development of a new one (or directly support one they rely on). But making a language "popular" and widely used is directly opposed to making it paid. There are plenty of closed languages out there, but they're only used by the corporations that developed them, and are probably kept closed to make sure the language doesn't stray from their business needs, and/or to maintain a competitive advantage.

Otherwise, I'm generally a fan of Odin, but I do find it quite irritating that only place to ask questions and participate in the "community" is locked behind discord. I even gritted my teeth and tried to make an account for discord just for this, but discord wouldn't accept my (apparently mandatory) phone number. Community questions and answers need to be readable and searchable without yet another login. If I'm learning a language and can't find an answer to a question that was almost certainly asked already, that's just another stumbling block that will prevent me from using said language.

I think that it is hard to market a new "pragmatic" language because the pragmatic decision in most cases is to use an existing language that you already know, that has a community around it with all it's accumulated wisdom (documentation, tutorials, blog posts, StackOverflow Q&A), rich library ecosystem etc.

The main point of "killer feature" is not to make the language more "hypeable" but to give a potential user a clear reason why the benefits of learning your language will outweigh the costs of using a less mature or less popular technology.

I recently used Odin in a commercial project and had a great experience. For me the biggest hurdle was not the language, but having to write programs without an IDE like Visual Studio/Xcode. Having to write my own build scripts (shell or batch files) etc and maintaining them is a PITA.

But I'm glad I did it because it checks off all the "C but nicer" checkboxes.

The SoA features look really nice. I have wanted that forever.

Matrices are built in(!), and look nicely implemented. So are complex numbers and quaternions!

The array programming aspects in general look great.

Zig might be the nicer language for a kernel or a server of some kind, but Odin looks like the better language not just for games, but also for robotics and for scientific programming.

The only problem I forsee is that it seems hard to write nice mathematical libraries for anything that isn't built in.

For example, suppose I want to work with polynomials using a natural infix syntax. Or that I want to wrap matrices/quaternions in types representing various mathematical groups. Or that I want to implement geometric algebra with wedge products and such. Or that I want to form matrices of elements from some finite field. Those sorts of things might push a person back to C++ (or maybe Nim can do it).

I love the SoA/array/matrix stuff though, and the "standard package" selections look great.

The best marketing for me is to see lots of useful/large projects using the language. That's why I invest time in Rust: lots of things are built on Rust, as the constant flow of "ABC written in Rust" posts on HN and other forums can attest to. Because that means that people who are good enough to write those things thought that Rust was a good choice.

Go is the same thing: I learned it because in devops it's the dominant language, which tells me it must be pretty good for those use cases (even if so many people dislike it, no one can claim it's not good enough).

I've looked into Odin and thought it was interesting, but given the amount of work being put into Zig, right now I feel like that's the safest choice (I must say I dislike how even basic things are still being changed in Zig, but no one said it would be otherwise so that's on me). Zig gives very tangible benefits, like not depending on just the LLVM (WIP) as a compiler backend, being able to compile to basically any combination of C stdlib/arch/OS from anywhere without worrying about toolchains and other things that I believe Odin lags behind, despite perhaps being the better language of the two when looking solely at its design (I am not too sure about that as I haven't used Odin for anything yet, and done very little Zig).

Odin's issue isn't hypeabilty but Googleability. I think for while I had to type odin-lang to find resources on it instead of The Odin Project.

I actually really enjoyed the language back when I'd used it. One issue I think every language leaves out there is that the language is just a tool and increasingly only one part of a larger tool the IDE/SDK/Engine/Platform. I don't want to really learn a language so much as make useful programs.

Right now we all pay attention when someone announces their new language that's supposed to do things better than existing ones out there but there is a limit to what problems a new language can address.

If you want to make a game for the Switch/PlayStation/Xbox you'll need an SDK and likely can't even use anything but c or c++. If you don't want to make your own engine you'll use whatever languages the engine uses to get things done in. If you want to make a cross platform app that handles accessibility and internationalization you're going to be making a web or electron app.

As much as I am interested in APL, Lisp and smalltalk right now, I get stuck when I ask 'What project am I interested in using this in?'

As someone who's working in gamedev but never ever considered Odin I think that Odin might get more attention if there will be a well known project that is a)open b)good fit for Odin c) not too simplistic. I do not think a game project can be that open but something smaller might do. A project like this would make it clear how language tools work, all integrations and interoperability with languages and libraries look like and such. Even basic questions on build systems and text editor autocomplete setups may throw off hobby devs. Without a hobby project I feel a pro will not have enough information to evaluate language in production environment.

Rather sure that the only way to market most anything is to make it very visible and quickly understandable (or have the appearance of). It's unclear to me what Ginger Bill expects from the language, a less used and well loved tool is good too (tee hee). Amongst whom should it be popular? How do you make as many of them as possible understand what problems it solves?

Money's a different question hey - there's more funding in open source than there used to be and you can really just ask for money and fill out paperwork and get grants and such if it's a useful project, otherwise it will need to embed into some kinds of important projects so that companies need to invest in it. Can Odin do that?

Asking the internet how to market a niche thing that they've never built is questionable at the outset though :v) Do wish the best for Odin though, it's kino.

Get some of those annoying YouTuber “dev influencers” to cover it and that will get all the developer teenagers hyped about it. It almost goes without saying that the YouTuber should also be gurning in the thumbnail.

There's a good episode of the "Developer voices" podcast with Ginger Bill about Odin.

(There are many other good episodes too - it's one of the best developer podcasts about imo)

> those “killer features” are usually absolute nonsense, very niche, or they rarely have any big benefit

This is a fantastic way to turn everyone off of your language: dismiss everything they like about the ones they're already using!

Very often these days I read about memory management as a differentiating factor. On one hand there's Rust with more "manual" memory management (I think) opposed to Go with its indeterministic GC pauses (see Discord blog posts about why they prefer Rust to Go because of that). On the other hand there's Go with its very simple automatic memory management. Where does Odin fit in?

I see that there are two paragraphs on memory management (https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#allocators) in the overview but they dive into the details very soon and don't really paint the big picture (I think the sentence "This means that Odin programmers must manage their own memory, allocations, and tracking" is not a great selling point, all other things being equal).

>And before people say: “Odin’s ‘killer feature’ is that it has none”, how the heck do you market that? That seems like an anti-marketing feature.

Correct me if i'm wrong but it seems to me that there are Zig, Nim, Dart, Carbon, C3, ooc, (maybe Eiffel?) too in this space, and that only counting C/C++ replacements that you can compile in a way or another.

>People expect a programming language and compiler to be free

Yes, they should both be free.

My understanding of Odin is that it's a relatively thin layer of preprocessor around C. So.. C but nicer?

Hey dang, why was this story completely removed?

It was near the top an hour or so ago, and now I can't even find it!

before reading the article, i have to say that odin won't make it unless it will invest serious time into networking. graphics, which is where odin shines, is very niche market and i bet that once JB's Jai comes to public, it might crush odin in this field by sheer persona behind the language in this specific niche. what makes or breaks language is the ecosystem and abilities to use it in various domains. today, the internet/networking moves mountains. it's where the most engineering and money is. if you cannot write fast http/rest/grpc servers with most used databases, your language will fade away into obsolescence, because it might bring nice new features, but if it cannot be used in the most popular fields, it will not make it. and odin is suffering in this aspect tremendously. it has the simple go-inspired syntax going on, but it has no oop/methods, so right there you have an obstacle for new users - it is too different from the norm. it might have great integration with various graphics libraries but it if is too different and lacks the ecosystem of libraries, package manager... there is no reason for it to exist. it also requires GIGABYTES of crap you need to download on windows in order to be able to compile a program. it also needs IDE support, mostly jetbrains, visual studio and vs code, which are the dominant IDEs today. in short, if it lacks convenience of Go or Zig, or even Rust, there really is no point in investing time into it.

PS: this is just off the cuff comment, not too thought out. also, Odin has a chance to beat Zig, due to better syntax and being essentially complete, beside having official spec. Which is not the case of Zig. Zig has traction but lacks in areas where Odin does not. So I would focus on Zig as the competitor, Rust as second. The simplified go-like syntax is one of the main selling points. But there must be more to the language.

PPS: I think the choice of ^ to handle pointers is one of the worst decision in the syntax. The * and & are the norm and should not be messed with.

From a look at Odin's site, its pitch sounds awfully similar to Zig

It seems that Odin and Zig target similar use cases.

How do they compare?