I moved my gamedev stack back to plain C, and I don’t have a second thought about it.
The community held onto the dream of a “better C” for games, but the narrative shattered when Odin lost a prominent core contributor, Feoramund. When a developer who shaped the core ecosystem moves on, it forces you to look at reality.
The ground has shifted. Rust captured the mindshare for a modern, robust ecosystem, leaving niche languages isolated. More importantly, AI changed how fast you can build games. When writing plain C, LLMs possess a flawless understanding of your code, generating boilerplate, bindings, and math routines instantly. Using Odin is frustrating when forced to manually write library bindings for some Windows API, whereas C gives you native access out of the box.
I was staying with Odin for syntax aesthetics. But I don’t care about romanticizing source code anymore; I care about raw output and shipping games. C gives me an infinite ecosystem, perfect compiler stability, and flawless AI acceleration. Enjoy your syntax sugar. I’ll be on Steam.