Comment by 59nadir
10 months ago
I would suggest linking to a timestamped point in the video instead of the entire thing. With regards to Odin having metaprogramming this is either a misunderstanding on your part of what was said or a misunderstanding from Casey Muratori with regards to Odin; Zig has a much stronger claim to having metaprogramming with `comptime` being as powerful as it is, whereas Odin only scarcely can be said to have a limited "static if" in the `when` keyword, plus your average parametric polymorphism via template parameters.
C programmers (and C++ programmers) who don't like Zig or Odin can simply use C (or C++), it's not really the case that they have to switch to anything, much less something as overwrought as Rust. My point is that it is natural for someone who is at any proficiency level above 0 in C to want to apply that proficiency in something that allows them to make use of those skills, and C, C++, Odin and Zig all allow them to do that, pretty much immediately.
You contend that "It's an investment to become as proficient in the other language" but I would argue that this is a very wide spectrum where Rust falls somewhere in the distance as opposed to all of the languages I mentioned instead being far closer and more immediately familiar.
True that Odin is admittedly quite limited in that area. Muratori made the case that Jai was far beyond both Zig and Odin, thus recommending its use and what made it attractive for him. The other issue, is investing in languages that are in beta.
The counter, in regards to "any proficiency above 0", is there are other alternative languages (that are easier to learn and use) where knowledge of C can be put to immediate use too. Getting up to speed in those languages, would likely be much faster, if not more productive for less proficient or experienced programmers.
> The other issue, is investing in languages that are in beta.
I work full time with Odin and I wouldn't put too much stress on this point as I've found that whatever issues we have with Odin are simply issues you'd have with C for the most part, i.e. C knowledge will help solve it. It's not a complex language, it doesn't need to do much and language-specific issues are few and far between because of it. Tooling is a bit of a mixed bag but it's about 80% solved as far as we're concerned.
Odin day-to-day for working on 3D engines (which I do) is not beta quality, whatever that means. I would rate it a better net fit for that purpose than I would C++, and I wrote the kind of C++ you would write for engine work for about 10-11 years (at least what we knew to be that kind of C++ at around 2001). For server software I'd rate it worse, but this is mostly because there are a few missing FFI wrappers for things that usually come up, it's not really because of the language per se.
As for Jai, I can't claim to know much of anything about it because I've never used it, and I wouldn't take many peoples' word for much of anything about the language. As far as I'm concerned Jai will exist when it's publicly available and until then it's basically irrelevant. This is not to disparage the effort, but a language is really only relevant to talk about once anyone with motivation and an idea can sit down, download/procure it and use it to build something, which is not the case with Jai.
> It's not a complex language
You cannot claim this when even codebases with veteran C developers will be virtually guaranteed to have memory safety issues at some point.
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