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Context: Odin’s Most Misunderstood Feature

Even with the documentation on the topic, many people completely misunderstand what the context system is for, and what problem it actually solves. For those not familiar with Odin, in each scope, there is an implicit value named context. This context variable is local to each scope and is implicitly passed by pointer to any procedure call in that scope (if the procedure has the Odin calling convention). The main purpose of the implicit context system is for the ability to intercept third-party code and libraries and modify their functionality. One such case is modifying how a library allocates something or logs something. In C, this was usually achieved with the library defining macros which could be overridden so that the user could define what they wanted. However, not many libraries support this, in any language, by default which meant intercepting third-party code to see what it does and to change how it does it is generally not possible.

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