Odin is currently at the top of my Rust exit-ramp strategy (for personal work).
As I grow older, I find myself wanting to use languages that are more conservative in their designs. Back in my 20s, I was all about expressivity and meta-programming: Scheme, Smalltalk, OCaml, and Haskell were my drugs of choice. I looked down upon those simple peons who used pedestrian languages like Java or PHP and I definitely looked down on those neckbeards who hadn't left their C caverns and didn't know the greatness of closures, higher-kinded types, hygienic macros and all those features that real languages had.
That's how I came to learn about Rust: in the early 2010s, there was a post on Reddit about a new programming language implemented in OCaml. Even before Rust 0.1 was released I was a Rust enthusiast. And what a ride it's been! Rust transformed and evolved a lot since its first days, but what a language it ended up becoming! In a just a few years, Rust went from being a hobbyist toy to an industrial-strength tool used by large projects and corporations like Mozilla, Dropbox, Discord, Amazon, Facebook, and more. I've been using it professionally myself for the past 5 years and it's been (mostly) a great experience.
But as Rust and I continue to change, it seems that the paths of our lives are diverging. As I gather more gray hair, I don't have the energy, the time, or even the passion for learning and master exotic language features anymore. I now avoid a lot of the "cool toys" that I was so enamoured with in my 20s. My programming style is now much closer to what it was when I first learned to program in Turbo Pascal in the mid-90s: mostly functions, arrays, and structs. Rust on the other hand continues its quest to be an industrial language that has ivory tower creds: the community and the core team enthusiastically look forward to having more ways to abstract code, more ways to express constraints at the language level. I feel that before long, my values and Rust's will have grown so far apart that we'll have no choice by to break up our long relationship.
So I've been looking for what else I could use for personal projects. (I think and hope that I continue to use Rust for my professional career.) Odin is at the moment my clear favorite, with Zig slightly behind, and Nim after that. I find that Odin's design represents my own values about what software and a programming language ought to be like better than anything else out there at the moment. It's high-level, has out-of-the-box support for dynamic arrays and dictionaries (I think, the two most useful data structures), and the whole language is simple enough that I learned most of it in a weekend. It does feel like a step back from Rust in certain areas -- null pointers, using product types for returning errors, no ownership checking -- but I think that I'm at a point where I'm ready to forgive and deal with these issues in order to have a tool that is simpler and doesn't evolve at the speed of 20 year olds.
As I grow older, I find myself wanting to use languages that are more conservative in their designs. Back in my 20s, I was all about expressivity and meta-programming: Scheme, Smalltalk, OCaml, and Haskell were my drugs of choice. I looked down upon those simple peons who used pedestrian languages like Java or PHP and I definitely looked down on those neckbeards who hadn't left their C caverns and didn't know the greatness of closures, higher-kinded types, hygienic macros and all those features that real languages had.
That's how I came to learn about Rust: in the early 2010s, there was a post on Reddit about a new programming language implemented in OCaml. Even before Rust 0.1 was released I was a Rust enthusiast. And what a ride it's been! Rust transformed and evolved a lot since its first days, but what a language it ended up becoming! In a just a few years, Rust went from being a hobbyist toy to an industrial-strength tool used by large projects and corporations like Mozilla, Dropbox, Discord, Amazon, Facebook, and more. I've been using it professionally myself for the past 5 years and it's been (mostly) a great experience.
But as Rust and I continue to change, it seems that the paths of our lives are diverging. As I gather more gray hair, I don't have the energy, the time, or even the passion for learning and master exotic language features anymore. I now avoid a lot of the "cool toys" that I was so enamoured with in my 20s. My programming style is now much closer to what it was when I first learned to program in Turbo Pascal in the mid-90s: mostly functions, arrays, and structs. Rust on the other hand continues its quest to be an industrial language that has ivory tower creds: the community and the core team enthusiastically look forward to having more ways to abstract code, more ways to express constraints at the language level. I feel that before long, my values and Rust's will have grown so far apart that we'll have no choice by to break up our long relationship.
So I've been looking for what else I could use for personal projects. (I think and hope that I continue to use Rust for my professional career.) Odin is at the moment my clear favorite, with Zig slightly behind, and Nim after that. I find that Odin's design represents my own values about what software and a programming language ought to be like better than anything else out there at the moment. It's high-level, has out-of-the-box support for dynamic arrays and dictionaries (I think, the two most useful data structures), and the whole language is simple enough that I learned most of it in a weekend. It does feel like a step back from Rust in certain areas -- null pointers, using product types for returning errors, no ownership checking -- but I think that I'm at a point where I'm ready to forgive and deal with these issues in order to have a tool that is simpler and doesn't evolve at the speed of 20 year olds.