mu1 VS Odin

I got sick of juggling code that migrated from one category to the other, so I wrote a little script that deals with chopping up a large source file into multiple TUs before feeding them to the compiler.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build2

More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33574154#33575045

This really speaks to me. Modern software is too hard to assemble from source. If you're shipping sources, every moving part you add increases the odds of something going wrong on other people's computers.

It's worth having some skepticism of tools. By making some operations easy, tools encourage them. Build systems make it easy to bloat software. Package managers make it easy to bloat dependencies. This dynamic explains why Python in particular has such a terrible package management story. It's been around longer than Node or Rust, so if they seem better -- wait 10 years!

For many of my side projects I try to minimize moving parts for anyone (usually the '1' is literally true) who tries them out. I work in Unix, and one thing I built is a portable shell script that acts like a build system while being much more transparent about what it does: https://codeberg.org/akkartik/basic-build

When I use this script my build instructions are more verbose, but I think that's a good thing. They're more explicit for newcomers, and they also impose costs that nudge me to keep my programs minimalist.

You can see this build system evolve to add partial builds and parallel builds in one of my projects:

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build0

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build1

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build2

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build3

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build4

Each of these does the same thing for this one repo -- build it -- but adding successively more bells and whistles.

I think providing just the most advanced version, build4, would do my users a disservice. It's also the most likely to break, where build0 is rock solid. If my builds do break for someone, they can poke around and downgrade to a simpler version.

Totally agreed!

Here's a prototype from a few years ago where I tried to make this easier: https://github.com/akkartik/mu1#readme (read just the first few paragraphs)

I still think the full answer lies in this direction.

There's also Odin[0] too. I tried using them all and Odin was pretty nice. Nim is also good too but a lot more features.

But - I concluded that language matters a lot less compared to APIs. Yes, the language should have enough good features to let the programmers express themselves, but overall well designed APIs matter a lot more than language. For example -tossing most of the C stdlib and following a consistent coding style (similar to one described here -[1]), with using Arenas for memory allocation, I can be just as productive in C.

[0] - https://odin-lang.org

I highly recommend looking at:

* The Overview: <https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/>

* examples/demo: <https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/blob/master/examples/demo/...>

As for the first example: a basic lexing example is probably boring, but it does show some basic ideas of what the language is about. If people want to write better examples or just reorder the current ones, please feel free to make an issue or PR on the website's GitHub page: <https://github.com/odin-lang/odin-lang.org>.

I use Odin primarily, it’s C-level but pascal/Go syntax and inspiration https://odin-lang.org/

Website: https://odin-lang.org/

Get it from the website: https://odin-lang.org/ -- Odin includes bindings to popular gamedev libraries & APIs such as Raylib, SDL, DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan.