Odin, a Pragmatic C Alternative with a Go Flavour

Odin is a general-purpose systems programming language authored by Bill “gingerBill” Hall. Designed as a modern alternative to C, Odin emphasizes simplicity, performance, and readability without sacrificing control over low-level details. The website says it’s “data-oriented”, and features such as SOA (structs-of-arrays) and implicit zero initialization tie into that. Despite this focus, the language surprisingly has dynamic maps and arrays built into the language itself. While the memory is still manually managed, it’s uncommon to see such built-ins. This perhaps sets the tone of Odin: it tries to be ergonomic and easy to write by offering a lot out of the box. Odin also comes with “vendor”, containing bindings to a wide variety of popular libraries. This makes the language very easy to get into. Design Philosophy Odin focuses on practical solutions to real-world programming challenges—in other words, it favours pragmatism over idealism (I’ll return to this when I later discuss Zi ... Read full article.