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odin-lang/odin

★ 10,306OdinAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5Setup · moderate

TLDR

Odin is a modern programming language built as a practical alternative to C, designed around data-oriented principles for high-performance software like games and real-time systems, with included standard libraries and tooling.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Odin))
    Philosophy
      C alternative
      Data-oriented design
      Hardware-first thinking
    Standard Libraries
      Core collection
      Vendor bindings
    Platform Support
      Windows
      Linux
      macOS
    Community
      Discord
      Blog and articles
      Nightly builds
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Write a high-performance game or real-time simulation in Odin where control over memory layout and raw speed are critical.

USE CASE 2

Replace C code in a systems project with Odin for better ergonomics without sacrificing native performance.

USE CASE 3

Use the included vendor library bindings to call widely-used C libraries like SDL or OpenGL directly from Odin code.

Tech stack

OdinLLVM

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Language is pre-1.0 and may have occasional breaking changes, expect some rough edges during active development.

In plain English

Odin is a programming language built as a modern alternative to C, aimed at developers who need to write fast, low-level software without fighting an overly complicated language. This repository contains the Odin compiler, the standard libraries, and the surrounding tooling. When you install Odin, you get everything needed to write and run Odin programs on Windows, Linux, or macOS. The language was designed around a philosophy called "data-oriented design," which focuses on how programs organize and move data through memory. Rather than building elaborate hierarchies of objects and abstractions, Odin encourages writing code that matches how the hardware actually works. This approach is popular in areas like game development and real-time systems where raw speed matters. Odin comes with two sets of libraries included in the project. The "core" collection covers common needs such as strings, math, file handling, and networking. The "vendor" collection provides bindings to widely used third-party libraries. Package documentation is published separately at the Odin website for easy reference. The project has an active Discord community, a blog with announcements and articles from the team, and an examples repository showing how to write typical Odin programs. A nightly build channel lets developers follow the latest changes before they appear in a stable release. One note worth keeping in mind: the README explicitly states that the Odin compiler is still in development. The language is functional and used by a growing community, but it is not yet at a 1.0 release milestone. People who want to experiment with it should expect some rough edges and occasional breaking changes as the design continues to mature.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I'm learning Odin as my first systems language coming from Python. Show me how to read a file line by line, store the lines in a slice, and print each one with its line number.
Prompt 2
Help me write an Odin program that allocates a fixed-size memory arena, fills it with custom structs, and iterates over them efficiently in a game update loop.
Prompt 3
Show me how to call OpenGL rendering functions from Odin using the vendor bindings included in the standard library.
Prompt 4
Convert this simple C struct and function to idiomatic Odin code, applying data-oriented patterns instead of object-oriented ones.
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