Get the latest tech news

Odin: A programming language made for me

In my book Understanding the Odin Programming Language I wrote that “Odin incorporates some of my favorite C best practices, straight into the language”. But I didn’t really elaborate on the details. Let’s do that here! This brings me to talking a bit about a previous job I had. Back in 2021 I worked at a place called Our Machinery. We were creating a whole game engine in plain C. We used a very comfortable and powerful way to program C.

But in Odin, my own code and the core libraries can reason about custom allocators, making the concept even more powerful. ZII, short for zero is initialized, means that you try to make the zero-value of memory valid in as many situations as possible. Write the code that you need for the problem at hand, don’t pretend to be a giant game engine company.

Get the Android app