[jkercher]

When I first heard about Odin, I thought, why another C replacement?! What's wrong with rust or zig? Then, after looking into it, I had a very similar experience to the author. Someone made a language just for me! It's for people who prefer C over C++ (or write C with a C++ compiler). It has the things that a C programmer has to implement themselves like tagged unions, slices, dynamic arrays, maps, and custom allocators. While providing quality of life features like distinct typing, multiple return values, and generics. It just hits that sweet spot. Now, I'm spoiled.

[karl_zylinski]

It's indeed some kind of sweet spot. It has those things from C I liked. And it made my favorite workflows from C into "first class citizens". Not everyone likes those workflows, but for people like me it's pretty ideal.

[lblume]

May I ask what specifically you dislike about Rust (and Zig)? All the features you mentioned are also present in these languages. Do you care about a safety vs. simplicity of the language, or something else entirely?

[sph]

Call it a niche use-case, but every time I had the chance to evaluate Rust, I had to write a function taking a callback, sometimes across to a C library. Every time I have to deal with an Fn/FnOnce/FnMut trait signature, remember if I need to box it with dyn, mayhaps it takes a reference as argument so I also need to deal with lifetimes signatures, then remember the `for<'a>` syntax, then it blows up because I need to add `+ 'static` at the end which still makes no sense to me, then I just rage quit. I am decently handy with (unsafe) Rust, wrote a minimal OS in it, but dealing with function pointers makes me want to carve my eyes out.

C doesn’t even care. You can cast an int to a function pointer if you want.

With Odin it’s taken me like 5 minutes including reading the section of the docs for the first time.

[phalanx104]

`impl Fn/FnOnce/FnMut` don't stand for function pointers, but rather function items in Rust, and as such they are zero sized so Rust can provide optimizations regarding function items specifically at compile time.

They can decay to function pointers (`$(unsafe)? $(extern)? fn($(inp),*) $(-> $(output))?`, example: unsafe extern fn() -> i32), which you can freely cast between function pointers, `*const/mut T` pointers or `usize`s. https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/types/function-pointer.h...

[jkercher]

Rust and Zig are both perfectly fine languages. Odin wins on simplicity and familiarity for me. I'm most productive in C which is what I use at work. So, for me, it's a better C with some quality of life improvements. It's not trying to be too radical, so not much to learn. The result is that I move can fast in Odin, and it is legitimately fun.

[PenguinCoder]

Mirrors my experience too. Odin is a joy for us oldie C programmers. Rust; not in the slightest.

[steveklabnik]

Your experience is not universal, there are oldie C programmers who also enjoy Rust.

[ithkuil]

Zig is similar in spirit but I think it tapped a bit more into the "innovation budget" and thus it might not click to all

[christophilus]

Yep. It’s my favorite C-replacement. It compiles fast. It has all of the pieces and abstractions I care about and none of the cruft I don’t.