[FullGarden_S]

and yet it never truly became an issue at all because there is an officially maintained, high quality package collection.

https://pkg.odin-lang.org/

GingerBill and the Odin community put tremendous effort into making sure that the Odin compiler ships with "batteries included". You get base, core and vendor library collection that cover almost everything a developer would need to the point that you can argue that you don't need a package manager for Odin.

[scuff3d]

I'm aware, I've been following Odin for a few years. I wasn't saying that in judgement. I like Odin and I generally like Ginger Bill's approach to things.

That being said it's way to early to say it "never became an issue". Odin is still small and not well established. If/when it starts to grow in popularity someone is going to develop a solution eventually. It's impossible for the language to offer EVERYTHING people could need, and developers love package managers.

[Ygg2]

That's great. But I need an Aerospike/YAML/JPEGXL/Slint libraries first thing in the morning.

Is it in vendor package yet? No? Then Odin vendor package will be a bottleneck for development.

[FullGarden_S]

All the things you demanded require a significant amount of financial support to both create and maintain, and that is where Odin falls short. If you really do need all those libraries first thing in the morning, then forget about the language; it's out of your hands. You will always be at the mercy of the industry, and you will be forced to pick and use whatever language the majority of the industry is using while the industry keeps tailoring the majorly adapted languages to do things the languages weren't designed for in the first place.

Also, all the libraries you demanded have almost nothing to do with the language itself. Odin, as a solo project, lacks both the financial backing and the cult-like obsessive adoption within its community-both of which are essential for breaking into the industry and reaching the mainstream status. It's the industry's adaptability and the community's enthusiasm that determine how many new libraries will emerge for a programming language. Unlike modern languages like Rust and Zig, which have their respective foundation organizations that employ and pay several full-time developers, languages like Odin and C3 that stripped-down complexity and subjectively annoying features got no serious fancy features to market to the target consumers, making it hard for them to gain any exponential momentum. So, give the current state of things, we can certainly say that Odin will not provide any of those libraries any time soon.

Besides, the Odin developers are perfectly fine using libraries written in other languages, whether Rust, C, or anything else. If a library in another language works and will get the job done, re-writing it in Odin is logically pointless for getting the job done. The only people who seem to have an issue with Odin's ecosystem are backend developers. Low-level systems programmers and graphics developers have their needs well met(there are no built-in green threads or fibers but there is support for SIMD and all major graphics API bindings). Networking requires stable, secure maintenance, so unless someone from the community steps up to create and maintain an HTTP/3 or QUIC implementation, there will never be native HTTP/3 support in Odin. The same applies to Aerospike, YAML, JPEG XL, Slint, and everything else. Gotta see how things will turn out.

[skydhash]

I see binding, so maybe interops with C is trivial. And just like that, you’ll have the thousand existing C libraries.

[Ygg2]

Binding is one thing, having idiomatic library is another.

[scuff3d]

Seems like a good project. You could develop your own and then work to get them committed back up stream.