Wookash Podcast Odin creator Ginger Bill on his programming language and state of software!
Dec 19, 2024
Bill Hall, aka Ginger Bill, is the creator of the Odin programming language and an ex-physicist at JangaFX. He shares the origins of Odin as a user-friendly C alternative, emphasizing its pragmatic design and built-in safety features. Bill dives into Odin's unique data types, the importance of allocator strategies, and its growing adoption in the industry. He expresses concern over modern software’s decline in quality and discusses how his physics background influences his programming philosophy. Plus, he offers advice for aspiring language developers!
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Pragmatic C Replacement
- Odin began as a pragmatic C alternative focused on safety and simplicity rather than feature bloat.
- Bill realized C's type system and semantics were fundamentally flawed and designed Odin to fix those core issues.
Prefer Real Array Types
- Use proper array types with length and bounds checking instead of pointer-decayed C arrays.
- Prefer language-level constructs that express length and safety rather than ad-hoc extra variables.
Built-In Allocators And Context
- Odin exposes custom allocators as first-class language features to enable arena, pool, and stack strategies.
- The implicit context system lets you override third-party behavior like allocation without modifying that code.
