Odin: Moving Towards a New "core:OS"

I like Odin and hope for it to gain more momentum.

I have an important metric for new "systems" languages: does the language allow NULL for it's commonly used pointer type. Rust by default does not (References may _not_ be NULL). Here is where I think Odin makes a mistake.

In the linked blog post Odin mentions ^os.File which means pointer to File (somewhat like *FILE in C). Theoretically the pointer can be NULL. In practice, maybe I would need to check for NULL or maybe I would not (I would have to scan the Odin function's documentation to see what the contract is).

In Rust, if a function returns &File or &mut File or Box<File> etc. I know that it will never be NULL.

So Odin repeats the famous "billion-dollar mistake" (Tony Hoare). Zig in comparison is bit more fussy about NULL in pointers so it wins my vote.

Currently this is my biggest complaint about Odin. While Odin packages a lot of power programming idioms (and feels a bit higher level and ergonomic than Zig) it makes the same mistake that Golang, C and others make regarding allowing NULL in the default pointer type.

I've been actively toying with Odin in past few days. As a Gopher, the syntax is partially familiar. But as it is a lower level language wiht manual-ish memory management, simple things require much more code to write and a ton of typecasting. Lack of any kind of OOP-ism, like inheritance(bad), encapsulation(ok), or methods(nobrainer), is very spartan and unpleasant in 2025, but that's just a personal preference. I don't think I ever used fully procedural language in my entire life. It requires a complete rewiring on one's brain. Which I'd say is a huge obstacle for most programmers, definitely from the younger crowd. For low-level guys, this is quite a nice and powerful tool. For everyone else, it's a bit of a head ache(even Zig has methods and interfaces). The language still lacks basic things like SQL drivers, solid HTTPS stack, websockets, and essentially anything related to web and networking(which has the bare bones functionality). As a Gopher, I am biased, but the web rules the world, so it is objective complaint. In the end, this is a solid language with great support for 2D and 3D graphics and advanced mathematics, which naturally makes it a very niche language for making games or anything to do with visual programming. Definitely try it out.

PS: I just read a funny comment on YT video: "Odin feels like a DSL for writing games masquerading as a systems language."

This is a delight to read. I've been doing a survey of languages over the last several days, and Odin is one of the more interesting ones... but looking at the OS and FS related parts of the standard library made me back away at high velocity. They seemed like litanies of generated code that simply describe every quirk of every platform: not an abstraction at all. And while I do want those levels to be _available_, I also don't want to be dragged down there in every program.

Delighted to see more work will be focused there in the future.

Anyone have a good comparison of Odin vs C/C++/Rust/Zig/Hare/etc? I'm particularly interested in how simple it is to implement a compiler in the given language.

Odin claims to be pragmatic (what language doesn't lol) but "All procedures that returned allocated memory will require an explicit allocator to be passed". Charitably, is this aimed at c/zig heads?

Language explorers looking for lower level languages like this may also want to take a peek at the V language. https://vlang.io/

I won't say with confidence either is better than the other; but I think both are worth a look.

Odin (iiuc) always makes you manage memory; Vlang permits you to, but does also have linking to the Boehm GC that it will generate for you in most cases.

Vlang and Odin in terms of syntax and legibility goals... well. I suggest if you're interested, just quick look will say more than I can. :)