gingerBill - Articles

AbstractRuntime Type Information (RTTI) has a cost, but it is a tame cost compared to Compile-Time Type Information (CTTI), which is sold as ;zero-cost;, and it is anything but.RTTI;s tables are a linear cost in the number of types (N types -; N entries),…

TL;DR: I believe Odin;s inline assembly is currently the best out of any language.The most important aspects are of this article listed below.

TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisiblestriving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool;s shortcomings and reselling them as a ;puzzle game; which is ;fun; to solve.I don;t wa…

Karl Zylinski;s Tom;s Namespaces: An Odin Fanfic is an excellent exploration of the namespacing problem in imperative programming languages such as Odin I highly recommend reading that article before reading this one!.

As with many discussions in the programming space, there are ;wars; between different ways of doing things.

I have seen a common remark from people who are not the biggest fans of Odin and it is usually the remark that Odin is ;full of sugar; which only works for the ;blessed types; and it cannot be replaced or implemented for user-level types.

Recently, Brodie Robertson produced a video on the Bizarre World of Wikipedia Deleting Programming Pages.

Odin;s declaration syntax becomes second nature to everyone who uses the language but I do sometimes get asked ;Why are there two ways to do type conversions?

Yes.But not necessarily in the ways you might think n.b.

I am still perplexed by how people judge a language purely by its declaration syntax, and will decide whether to use the language purely based on whether they like that aspect or not I am specifically talking about declaration syntax here and not other as…

There are only two families of proper arbitrary markup languages: TeX and SGML I would normally link to official thing as reference but it's behind the "wonderful" ISO paywall: ISO 8879:1986..

This article is continuation to: Was it really a Billion Dollar Mistake?.

TL;DR pointer dereferences are empirically the easiest class of invalid memory addresses to catch at runtime, and are the least common kind of invalid memory addresses that happen in memory unsafe languages.

Even with the documentation on the topic, many people completely misunderstand what the system is for, and what problem it actually solves.For those not familiar with Odin, in each scope, there is an implicit value named .

n.b.

I sometimes get asked if Odin has any plans to add hygienic macros or some other similar construct.

Originally from replies to a Twitter thread: https://x.com/TheGingerBill/status/1914389352416993395This is not a structured argument against FOSS/OSS but my uncommon thoughts on the topic.I am not sure if I agree [that FOSS/OSS derives from the same think…

The original Twitter thread: https://x.com/TheGingerBill/status/1508833104567414785I have a huge gripe when I read articles/tutorials on OpenGL: most people have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to coordinate systems and matrices.Specific…

[Originally from a Twitter Thread]Original Twitter Post;Killer Feature;Odin is a weird programming language to advertise/market for.Odin is very pragmatic in terms of its design and overall philosophy.

NOTE: This is based on, but completely rewritten, from a Twitter post:https://x.com/TheGingerBill/status/1802645945642799423TL;DR: It makes Go feel too ;functional; rather than being an unabashed imperative language.I recently saw a post on Twitter showing

[Originally from a Twitter Thread]Original Twitter PostOne thing many languages ; API designers get wrong is the concept of a string.

[Originally from a Twitter Thread]Original Twitter PostMany people may not know this but this video by Sean Barrett @nothings is partially the reason why I made the Odin programming language.And I;ll explain what insights it gave me in this thread .A lot…

[Originally from a Twitter Thread]Original Twitter PostI don;t know if I have ;ranted; about this here before but:I absolutely HATE comparing programming languages with ;benchmarks;.Language benchmarks rarely ever actually test for anything useful when co…

For my work at JangaFX, we require the use of the Alembic interchange file format.

I have recently been thinking about multiple return values as a concept, and wondering if there has been any kind of literature into the topic of ;true; multiple return values which are not emulated through tuples.

Buddy Allocators

Free List Allocators

[Originally from a Twitter Thread]I have revisited The Value Propagation Experiment and have come to a different conclusion as to why it failed and how I recovered it.The recovery work has been merged into master now with this PR: https://github.com/odin-…

[Originally from a Twitter Thread]Part 2 of this ExperimentThe IdeaI recently experimented with adding a feature into Odin which allowed for a way to propagate a value by early returning if that value was or not .

When I was designing the constant value system in Odin, I wanted literals (especially numbers) to ;just work;.

Note: This is a ;brain dump; article, and subject to be cleaned up.Categories of Structured Control FlowProcedure callTerminatingConditional, , Looping - loop with initial statement, condition, post statement, and body - loop with a value to be iterated o…

One thing I have noticed a lot when a programmer is struggling to solve a problem, especially a novice, is that he is stuck worrying about the ;best way; to implement the solution rather than actually understanding the problem he has.

I have been toying with a theoretical idea for the past 18 months off-and-on in my head and I have not fully articulated it aloud yet.

Audio Article:

I was originally going to write a normal prose article regarding the topic of Pragmatism in Programming, however I thought I;d experiment in style by writing in a proverbial style.The following concepts express the school of thought that I subscribe to wh…

Absolute PointersPointers are a value type in programming languages that store a memory address.

I read the article Let;s stop copying C about 3 years ago.

It is lovely to see many new programming languages being produced to solve different issues that the designers are trying to address.

A Quine in Odin:

Pool Allocators

Stack Allocators

Linear/Arena Allocators

Thinking About Memory and Allocation

Article was originally posted here: https://odin.handmade.network/blogs/p/3372-exceptions_-_and_why_odin_will_never_have_themOriginal Comments:https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/issues/256#issuecomment-418073701https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/issues/256#…

Article was originally posted here: https://odin.handmade.network/blogs/p/2994-on_the_aesthetics_of_the_syntax_of_declarationsn.b.

Article was originally posted here: https://odin.handmade.network/blogs/p/1723-the_metaprogramming_dilemmaDesigning this language has been difficult but fun.

One of my favourite things about Go is the statement.