By far the best feature (IMO) is that it has no trouble talking to the most important Windows COM libraries (like DirectX) and the Objective-C runtime (for Metal), and this comes as "batteries included", not some random third party library you have to download.

So for any sort of visual engine development (game engines being the most obvious, but also applications like blender or the JangaFx suite which is the main user of Odin), it is great. What you need is just there ready to go.

The language design itself is very much oriented around appealing to people who do this sort of work.

Other than there isn't much to the language really. It lacks a "big idea" feature like Rust's lifetimes or Zig's comptime. The closest thing to a "big idea" is the rejection of package managers but that's not really part of the language.

It's pleasant to use and compiles fast. Hard to complain.

Game development.

Go really only took off thanks to Docker and Kubernetes, and even if it would be capable, there is hardly an ecosystem there.

Rust could be there, but there is really only Bevy, and several companies have tried it and pivoted to something else due to compile times hindering fast prototyping workflows.

Odin was created at a games company, JangaFX, and has already a few products using it.

https://jangafx.com

Also Odin batteries include what you need to start coding a game right away, https://pkg.odin-lang.org/vendor

At the level of this question, with most responses addressing Odin versus Rust or Go as in the question, I'd have been curious for community thoughts adding in Nim and Swift (now that Swift is on Linux and in any IDE that can use SourceKit-LSP).

https://www.swift.org/install/linux/

See:

"A series of small programs/tasks to compare C++, Go, Zig, Odin, D, Janet, Swift, Nim and C# to see which I like the most"

https://github.com/phillvancejr/Cpp-Go-Zig-Odin

Interactive applications where a GC is not an option.

Rust is shockingly good at being a general purpose language, but that's in the face of the strict semantics of the language and approach to memory. There became a comparison against Go because Go offers strong performance and a complete opposite memory-management experience (in having a GC that largely solves it for you.) Odin sits between these two levels of friction, leaning far more on the Go side of things. There are goodies in Odin which make memory management much breezier than other manual languages, but I'll admit it is still a task you are expected to complete.

So that's the story on the memory-management effort. That aside, I'd say Odin is best for interactive applications where a GC is not an option. Although at this point it comes out of my hands so easily that I'd probably write Odin in some situations where it'd be less optimal, and it'd be fun so why not?

Game engine programming, more generally projects where the programmer controls the spec and data. More specifically, passing custom allocators to specific subsystems.

That may sound like "Q:why buy this truck? A:Cos it has a nice oil filter" but it marketed as a language "[for the] joy of programming".

Perhaps the goal is to get more people into programming following the same playbook as the scripting wars we had in the 2000s. Or it's part of a larger trend to get mind-share away from c.

Sure, but at least Odin embraces more stuff than Go, with its design mindset.

It has naturally the influences that came via Oberon-2.

Yeah, all valid justifications.

It's probably a joke, because Odin was deleted from Wikipedia for being "not notable" recently, and the author thought it was because of his politics.

I do think the guy's politics suck, but I also think his language's wiki page was probably targeted for it.

yeah, it was a joke referencing this link that was on the front page a couple days ago,

https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/

a little over the etiquette line for HN, the lack of joke comments here is awesome and i shouldn't be part of lowering our collective brows

I think plenty of people will still use Odin, primarily because there's a lot more batteries included, but everything about this announcement makes me think Bill is worried about the competition, and trying to showcase his 1.0 with all his batteries...while releasing around the same time as jai. Kinda weird behavior imo.

What is the strong argument exactly? Odin coexists happily with Zig, Rust, C3, nim already, no?

The entire concept of Odin seems to be taken from Jai. They're both aiming to be C/C++ replacements "for the joy of programming" (another thing that was in the early Jai videos that Bill ripped off). In addition to the syntax (which is eerily similar across the entire language), there is the "using" keyword, the "defer" keyword, the context system, custom allocators, native AoS, polymorphic procedures, etc.

Again, any one of those things on it's own is not a smoking gun, and many of these features and syntax are becoming standard in modern languages. But the fact that SO MANY of Odin's features and even it's marketing strategy seems to be copying Jon Blow is weird to me. You can still go watch Jon's videos demoing early Jai from 11 years ago...and if you check the comments you'll see a familiar ginger face, so there's no doubt Bill saw those videos when they came out, and began developing Odin AFTER he saw Jai.

If he was simply inspired by Jon that's fine, there's nothing wrong with more well-thought out programming languages in the world. But when you copy a lot of the language, copy the announcement to the announcement video, copy the announcement video, and also plan to release at the exact same time as Jai, while largely denying that Jai had any influence of your language, red flags will go off for anyone that's paying attention.