Posted by AlexeyBrin 6 hours ago
Never bought into rust (have studied, have a (mostly AI-generated app in rust).
Wrote some Zig but Odin is even less overhead for me. I first loved Zigs built-in build system but having tried to wrap/use C libraries from both, I must say I prefer Odin. Wrapping some sqlite 3 API’s for my first little Odin program - just because I need so little of the API that it seems easier this way - and speaking to C from Odin is a pleasure.
That is, imho, where Rust fails the most - the second part is the C++’ish approach to memory management (RAII) - that’s not how systems programming or games (I’m told) tend to work.
To each their own. I had some fun with Rust too, but for me, Odin seems the most appealing :)
Reference counting has deterministic timing, you can run a deconstructor without registering objects for deletion and running any known finalizers (what you need to do in all GC langs I’m aware of.)
You can even use the same ownership model as rust (borrowing et al.) with non copyable types.
What does this mean? Who told you that?
They largely don't deeply elaborate, which is sad because I am a professional game developer who is interested in precisely presented knowledge so I can apply it to my work.
My interpretation is that games want to allocate large pools of resources, like GPU buffers, cpu memory, etc, and reuse that memory over and over. Ie: Reinitialize it.
In my experience, RAII is my preferred pattern for certain things (std::lock_guard), and you can almost certainly express the majority of these "uber game dev patterns" using RAII/smart pointers/etc, but the c++ implementation of these "uber game dev patterns" tends to be more complicated (and imo esthetically ugly) compared to really well written C.
These new languages (zig, odin, jai) appear to be attempts to improve C to allow an alternative to C++ that doesn't have the ugly baggage that C++ has.
As on some references, Ryan Fleury did an episode on Wookash podcast on RAD debugger showing ECS like approach.
IMO, their RAII critique is a but nuanced, but because of their personality the discourse often gets polarising.
Edit: the sibling comment just proved my last point.
on the other hand there are no constructors (just normal functions) so you cant initialize values in place, only stack allocate and return. i think rust needs to add in place init and change the rules from "always init at declaration site" to "must be initialized at first use" like kotlin.
the big missing piece is custom allocators that let you use something like a bump arena with the same convenience as system malloc. they already exist on nightly but nobody knows when they will land on stable.
honestly thats the biggest problem with rust, they come up with a lot of useful changes but then take ages to stabilize because the core team is overworked. they also have a kind of perfectionist culture as a reaction to all the half baked features shipping in C++.
there should be a stage between nightly and full release where feature is in stable toolchains behind a cfg flag and you get a warning if upstream crates use it. show commitment to shipping it in time but still make it clear that it can change (in minor incompatible ways) before release.
This isn't true and doesn't make any sense. Smart pointers don't need to enter into it. If you need a lot of something you make a vector and allocate once.
Also I remember they mentioned it’s not necessary to free memory if you’re about to close your program, because the OS will take the memory back.
It is an extremely niche scenario to need a program to shut down so much faster that you can't even deallocate memory. If you don't make lots of small allocations in the first place the deallocations won't take any time.
Obviously you need to gracefully deinitialise some things, like audio or other devices, but that’s beyond the discussion.
It's actually a pretty big advantage to destructors to deal with stuff like this as well as memory and locks.
IMO, their RAII critique is a but nuanced, but because of their personality the discourse often gets polarising.
I think it gets polarizing because they are both undeniably sharp programmers but don't have any real evidence of this stuff, they are just grasping at rationalizations.
But a lot of languages aren't like that, and so this doesn't translate. Obviously in Rust with Vec<Goose> that's only 8 allocations, each local Goose lives in the stack - or, if you knew up front there were 500 geese, you Vec::with_capacity(500) and it's a single allocation - but similar is true in many languages, Java is an outlier.
Besides, as mentioned java's allocations are much closer to something like using an arena in a low-level language, then a "slow" malloc. It uses thread-local allocation buffers, where you have a large buffer with a pointer pointing to the start of the free region. Allocation is just a pointer bump, not even needing synchronization since it is per a single thread. As it gets full, the GC moves out still alive objects in the background and resets the buffer.
This is pretty much the most efficient one can be after per-object type arenas and simply not allocating.
Allocations are really really cheap in Java by the way, so I don't get how 500 allocations would even be an issue.
Goose jim = make_a_goose_somehow(); // Java, so jim is on the Heap, no way around it
let jim : Goose = make_a_goose_somehow(); // Rust, jim is on the stack
ArrayList<Goose> geese = new ArrayList<Goose>();
// ... some loop eventually
Goose a_goose = somehow_get_this_goose(); // That's an allocation
geese.add(a_goose);
let geese: Vec<Goose> = Vec::new();
// ... some loop eventually
let a_goose : Goose = somehow_get_this_goose(); // But this is not
geese.push(a_goose);Jon Blow worked on numerous AAA games that required “that level” of optimization. And he’s one of the very few developers in the last 15 years who have managed to sell more than a million copies of a game running on a scratch built 3D engine.
You can disagree with their opinions, but they certainly have the experience to back those opinions up.
Ah... The school of what I like to call "maximum opinions and minimal evidence". Aggressive arrogant dismissal of anything except their exact view (and for Muratori, you're also "woke" for good measure), coupled with a complete lack of _hard evidence_ to back up their views. In that regard, they're not unlike "investment advice" instagram influencers.
My interpretation is that games want to allocate large pools of resources, like GPU buffers, cpu memory, etc, and reuse that memory over and over. Ie: Reinitialize it.
They might say this, but there isn't a good technical rationalization here since anyone can create a global data structure just as easily in C++.
People who are motivated by a superiority complex or by the wish to impress a herd of twitter followers hardly if ever produce a thought I want to read.
My angle is systems programming, and there, it absolutely matter. If you are performance sensitive, then you try to avoid crossing the user-space -> kernel boundary more than you have to.
Eg, ask for lots of memory, manage with arenas.
Interestingly Odin and Zig both lean into this heavily. Rust went a different route but has tried later to bolt on pluggable allocators.
Building a database, operating system, etc. absolutely requires fine tuned control over allocation. You can get around some of these things in Rust, but it will fight you. You'll effectively have to turn your back on the containers in std and build your own vectors, maybe even your own Box, etc.
Odin looks really appealing to me at one level, but I'd have a hard time switching to any language at this point that doesn't have a borrow checker story.
This gives the misleading impression that ordinary memory allocators are materially different from arena allocators. They aren't. Both types of allocators first ask for a big block of memory from the kernel, then dole that memory out in userspace. There's no need to cross the userspace/kernel boundary more often than you need to, especially when you consider that you can replace the standard platform allocator with whatever you want.
To wit, C doesn't emphasize arena allocation anywhere near as much as Zig et al do, and yet nobody alleges that C is somehow less suitable for systems programming than these languages. Have you considered why that is? Because, for the most part, arena allocation doesn't make a significant difference, and in the places where it actually does make a difference, you can trivially build an arena allocator on top of the standard allocator.
The perf argument against RAII is very abstract and is less "RAII causes bad performance" and more "the kind of design that leads you to reach for RAII is the kind of design that's bad for performance." There exist similar hand-wavy arguments against many other C++/Rust features.
More generally, "you shouldn't even want that" is basically a meme at this point in programming language design. Every new-ish language has some version of it.
That said. You asked about C, which I use for my job. Most every large C code base end up abandoning the stdlib (such as it is) and inventing their own. Since they do, we aren’t as hurt by abandoning it as you would be in e.g. Rust - the rust stdlib is useful, the C stdlib is.. not great.
Once you abandon the stdlib, a likely first stop is writing your own routines for allocating and freeing memory. There are different approaches here, from glib’s or sqlite’s alloc and free routines to people writing an allocator abstraction (basically a struct with a vtable for allocating/realloc/free) and when you build your own “stdlib” around this abstraction, you are fine.
As for why you may want arenas vs other allocation strategies, that again deals with how often you are comfortable going across the user-space/kernel boundary and how clever you can be with your allocations or how much internal fragmentation you can accept.
As with all other stuff, it depends. But arenas are often great when you can assert that a series of objects share the same lifetime (death time, rather). In these cases, your amortize the syscall cost, have nearly no additional work to manage the memory (contrast to e.g. the complexity of jemalloc) and can free a series of objects in constant time.
My one issue is (and I'm fully aware it will never happen) I do wish there was some sort of first-class solution to inheritance. I've grown to love procedural programming, but some problems really are just better solved with a more OOP approach. Just because classes exist does not mean they need to be used.
But as far as a language to "get stuff done" with as few tradeoffs as possible, Odin is about as good as I can imagine a language being.
In your opinion, could a minimal system to develop in Odin be squeezed into a device like the one(s) you targeted?
That's assuming maybe some tweaks to the toolset, doing without some niceties, but not cutting core features out of the language.
Asking 'cause I have a passing interest in programming languages that allow for native development on really small implementations (think sub-1MB on bare metal). The list of candidates doesn't seem long.
Here's a UI framework, if you scroll down you'll see it on a Raspi Pico: https://github.com/MadlyFX/Ansuz
Could a toolset to develop in Odin be made to run on (not just target) an STM32 microcontroller like you used?
> It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures
That suggests the above would (in theory) be possible for any device that's roughly in the same class as "can run a C compiler". Correct?
I don't believe Xtensa (ESP32) is supported yet, but people have been asking for it, so it may happen at some point. ARM is well supported now though, obviously.
But mainly, language doesn't have a special gimmick. The main idea (imo) is it is opinionated to have defaults to cater for majority of the cases. So once you get used to it, it is pleasure to write C-like code in it.
Also, i disagree with your point about "promoting what you can do with it, rather than the language itself and its quirks". Like, what? Every language can do everything another language can. As long as it's turing-complete and has some interface for FFI or something similar, it can do anything. You can make a full modern SaaS in C if you really wanted to, from backend to frontend. The language itself and its quirks are what would make you maybe consider not doing that (as much as I love C, that would just be stupid if your goal is anything other than fun and experimentation).
I can see all the great software and games that were made with C++. Doesn't make me wanna use it though, the language sucks.
Your paragraph about IDE and the whole name thing just seems very out of touch to me. Are you a marketing / HR / sales person perchance?
Ultimately it all boils down to machine code. Programming languages avoid the tediousness of programming in that, express program flow in a more concise / elegant way, and manage complexity for the project at hand.
How that's done, is a matter of taste, and how well the tools suit the job. Existing runtime environments (say, browsers with highly-optimized JS engine) are important here.
> Show me what you made with this language - it will help me better understand the use case(s) and trade-offs.
That's the spirit!
A new language now has to clear the ever growing hurdle of not being in the LLM training data.
Unless the language provides an absolutely incredible technical or runtime advantage over every other language that LLMs “speak” well I think it will really struggle to gain adoption.
Additionally, a language’s qualitative benefits to human writers arguably matters less and less.
I used to live in my IDE. Now I use it maybe an hour each day even in a JVM based language. IDEs dont really matter as much anymore.
I found this to be far less of a prblen than I thought it would be.
Do you have practical experience?
Even if the LLM is adept at novel languages the developer still has to learn it and learning new languages now when most programming is done via a prompt-review loop feels like it has lower ROI.
But if a human-oriented language were to be designed to also be better for LLMs, I think it would involve deeply expressive syntax that can succinctly but distinctly represent a very broad set of common operations. Succinct so context can be managed well, distinct so completions don't confuse one thing for another, broad so as much "reasoning" can be taken away from the LLM as possible. An anti-C. A new take on the goals of Java and Go to be languages that protect the application from the Junior Developers You're Likely To Hire.
I somewhat think it would also involve application state images ala Smalltalk. LLMs seem okay at generating small deltas. Many deltas sequenced together invites compounding error. LLM generated apps are unlikely to lead to common libraries being compentized and extracted out of the application to share with other applications; it seems like LLM code generation is already a "married to a specific project" act already. So, having a living state image might reveal some benefits by leaning into incrementally developing the application in situ, as a whole.