I was watching an interview from John Blow and looks like Jai will be released soon. From what I know, Odin is heavily inspired by Jai and it’s also very targeted to game development.
Do you think Odin will lose momentum because of that? Specially given Jonathan’s reach?
Maybe, but it’s not important (except if you care about language wars). It’s just one more language out there.
“ODIN is NOT heavily inspired by Jai!!1!” - ODIN Fanboy
Over the years, Odin and Jai have diverged so far away from each other in terms of design that there are maybe a handful of syntax similarity left. I doubt Jai being released publicly will impact Odin.
People who love metaprogramming or cannot tolerate the opinionated hand-holding will choose Jai over Odin.
Otherwise, Odin has been public for much longer. It’s a simpler yet powerful language. It has a bastion of core and vendor packages that are sensibly chosen, polished, and helps you save time and focus on what you want to build.
No language is perfect and every choice involves trade-offs. Programmers will decide for themselves which is a better choice for their needs.
Technically, Jai was released long back. Jon’s been gate keeping it in the name of “closed beta testing”. I don’t think I’ll seriously try Jai even if it comes out.
I’m very happy with Odin. Personally, I will miss meta programming and module parameters(its hard to design the library API in Odin when there are multiple packages, each providing a different variant of the code based on its respective, independent compiler argument flags) but that’s fine.
The eliminated complexity in the language’s design to keep the language dead simple does come in handy in the long run so overall, massive W.
I took a quick glace and saw some syntactic similarities and lots of semi-colons. I envisioned them like programmer’s tears running down the page. They are nice to use if you want to (which I do on occasion), but much better as optional.
There are many similarities and many differences. The similarities I liked. Most of the differences not so much. A quote came to mind.
The gates of heaven and hell are adjacent and unmarked. -Carl Sagan
Personally, the best part of using Odin is opening up any third party code and being able to understand mostly all of it at a glance. It might just be my familiarity with the language but I don’t think the same will be true of Jai just with implicit namespaces and macros alone.
You would hope that people use these features responsibly but everyone has their use cases where it makes sense for them. But then they open source it and others start creating frameworks with them and now everyone has to deal with it. I like that I don’t have to worry about that using Odin.
