I created Odin for the very same reason that I wanted a tool that made me more productive and helped me solve the problems that I actually have. Even if Odin only benefited myself, I would class that as a success, but it has been helping so many people create amazing things.
Perhaps, but a programming language which is released when “done” is essentially dead on arrival. I’d guess the people who created amazing things with Odin helped the language move forward, right? Nothing wrong with keeping something to oneself, but promising for a long time to move something into an open source model with no set date.. I’ve rarely seen that end well. Hope I’m proved wrong though!
A reverse corollary to Russell's Teapot? So what if there is a teapot orbiting Jupiter, I can't get it so it allows me no ability to serve tea. Therefore it might as well not exist!
Just say it's not useful to you because you can't use it. No need to say it doesn't exist, even if it just doesn't exist "for you."
(As an aside, I think a lot of societal problems in the world today have roots in relativism and such -- so it's a bit of a bugbear.)
Of course you could make the argument that its mere existence and him highlighting certain aspects could have influences on other language designers... and wow am I going down a tangent spiral now...
Anyways: TL;DR reality is objective but words can have complex semantics
nimc --gc:none
Also, the arc/orc GC is shaping up and already allows you to use exclusively reference counted memory management - so, efficient and perfectly deterministic timing but still get automatic memory management. (As usual, if you introduce cycles, it becomes more complicated)
And the Nim compiler elides many ref/unref ops, as well as keeping objects thread-local, so most performance objections to ref counting don’t actually apply. (.... and you have a choice of other automatic GC modes, including “none”)
What good is a language if you can't (easily) use its libraries?
It has very different selectable GC systems - Boehm, Bacon/Dingle, reference counting, or real-time deadline mark-and-sweep, and “none”. Perhaps I forgot one. Some libraries rely on a specific GC behavior but most work with any (with the caveat that “none” requires you to manually deal with garbage).
Nim’s mark-and-sweep is suitable for embedded systems and games, unlike Java’s, and so is the ref counting one; but even if none of the GCs work for you, the fact that there’s many of them and they are mostly interchangeable means that the dependency on them is much, much weaker than you are used to (although it still exists)
Fun fact: Odin has this exact same thing with `using`. https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#using-statement
Windows().apply {
width = 100
height = 200
}
val someStructure = ...
someStructure.x = ...
someStructure.y = ...
someStructure.name = ...
As far as I can tell, Odin's `using` is applicable in the same areas as Kotlin's, but I still favor Kotlin's scoped version. When I see "using foo;" in Odin, it's not quite obvious to me where the scope of applicability is.
Any reason why you didn't do something like
entity.use {
// "this" is now the entity instance
}
// back to your regular "this"
?Koltin's approach is limited to purely the same Pascal's `with` allowed.
But if you want to be clear:
{ using entity;
// the fields of "entity" are not usable in this scope
x = 123;
}
entity.x = 123;