I have been porting our Odin code to C(23) lately because it's better than anything else I've found in terms of language simplicity + tooling quality. 75% of our new code right now is C and in my estimation that'll be 100% in about a month, and we'll likely be done porting ~150 kLoC into a similarly sized C code base.
Even disregarding tooling I'm actually happier writing C than (even) Odin because it's really just a natural end state of changes I'd made to how I write code over the past 7-8 years and what I expect from a language (to not do much, and to not get in the way).
It's hard to compete with the tangibles of writing/using C:
- Somehow it has shorter compile times than everything else still, particularly for release builds?
- Everything that matters (to me) has C bindings.
- All the tools just work and they work well (and a lot of them are made specifically for C anyway).
- The compilation model is actually better, more straight forward and easier to make fast than languages that try to "fix" it, unless you sit there fighting it and overcomplicate it with overwrought build systems. (`make` is better than I used to give it credit for, though).
I think Ada is the only language that could peel my attention away from C at the moment, which is ironic given my "Don't do much, get out of my way" stance. It turns out you can do more if you're sensibly designed, have the right escape hatches and actually provide real, useful features (basically every feature regarding arrays in Ada and their interplay with other features like index types, etc.). Ada is not as easy to port from Odin, though, and Ada would be a much bigger gamble than C in so many ways. We don't mind writing the code we use ourselves (we in fact prefer it), but in Ada a lot of that code would be decidedly alien to how Ada seems to work in many ways.
With that said, I do have an Ada port of a game I was working on that does illustrate a lot of upsides. It's a different possible end state.
P.S. I've tried Zig, I wrote Zig for several years before I started using Odin, it's what got me back to imperative, small, native languages. It's what started this journey back to C.
Even disregarding tooling I'm actually happier writing C than (even) Odin because it's really just a natural end state of changes I'd made to how I write code over the past 7-8 years and what I expect from a language (to not do much, and to not get in the way).
It's hard to compete with the tangibles of writing/using C:
- Somehow it has shorter compile times than everything else still, particularly for release builds?
- Everything that matters (to me) has C bindings.
- All the tools just work and they work well (and a lot of them are made specifically for C anyway).
- The compilation model is actually better, more straight forward and easier to make fast than languages that try to "fix" it, unless you sit there fighting it and overcomplicate it with overwrought build systems. (`make` is better than I used to give it credit for, though).
I think Ada is the only language that could peel my attention away from C at the moment, which is ironic given my "Don't do much, get out of my way" stance. It turns out you can do more if you're sensibly designed, have the right escape hatches and actually provide real, useful features (basically every feature regarding arrays in Ada and their interplay with other features like index types, etc.). Ada is not as easy to port from Odin, though, and Ada would be a much bigger gamble than C in so many ways. We don't mind writing the code we use ourselves (we in fact prefer it), but in Ada a lot of that code would be decidedly alien to how Ada seems to work in many ways.
With that said, I do have an Ada port of a game I was working on that does illustrate a lot of upsides. It's a different possible end state.
P.S. I've tried Zig, I wrote Zig for several years before I started using Odin, it's what got me back to imperative, small, native languages. It's what started this journey back to C.