Odin For Beginners

A note I made for myself to learn the Odin Programming Language as well as the included vendor libraries. The purpose isn’t to teach people, rather to teach myself. But feel free to follow along since I made this available for public.

Why I write this

I’m not familiar with most popular C libraries, and I want to explore it more. I couldn’t specific informations regarding to the bindings available for most of the vendor libraries from Odin. Consider this as an extension from Odin documentation for absolute beginners. I chose Odin as an excuse because it comes with all those libraries I should checkout but haven’t been able to do that since I hate starting project using a complex language like C and also to play around with this language that marketed themself as a better replacement for C.

Who’s this is for

This tutorial is meant to be as self-contained as possible, but not too self-contained that I have cover every single basic things. These are things to be expected from the reader:

• Someone who experienced in Unix, meaning know how to use command line apps, understand how to use the OS specific package manager, and basic development command line apps such as git and make. I mostly wrote my tutorials for Arch Linux only, so avoid the Arch Linux specific command if you’re not using Arch Linux.
• Someone who understand the shell program they use, whether it is bash, zsh, fish or something else. I wouldn’t cover how to do basic stuff using any shell.
• Someone who have basic understanding how a programming language work, meaning you already know and using one of many programming languages available and know how to navigate a documentation site.
• A low level programming skill is not required, although I personally have some experience using Rust that could influenced my writing. So keep in mind if you find it confusing.
• Some of my personal setup:
  • Operating system: Arch Linux
  • Shell: ZSH
  • Editor: Neovim
  • Vim plugin manager: vim-plug
  • LSP Plugin: coc.nvim

Why Odin?

Odin is a general purpose programming language with distinct typing built for high performance, modern systems and data-oriented programming[*]. Odin is batteries included, it comes with officially maintained binding for popular libraries such as OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D, Metal, WebGL, SDL2, GLFW, raylib, and much more.

⚠ As the time of this writing, Odin is still in heavy development, anything could change anytime. This tutorial is effective to be use for the dev-2022-08 release.

Further Odin support

FAQ: https://odin-lang.org/docs/faq/
Wiki: https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/wiki
Discord: https://discord.gg/sVBPHEv

Getting Started

Install Odin

To install the odin command to your PC:

1. Clone the Odin repo to your PC

git clone https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin

1. Build Odin, this should be quick (only took 11s on my machine)

cd Odin
./build_odin.sh

1. Add odin to your path

A good idea might to put the build artifacts on a new folder.

export PATH=$PATH:/your/directory/to/odin/executables/folder

1. Voila!

odin version
# this should print out something like `odin version dev-2022-08:e128ed7d`

Install OLS

OLS is a language server for Odin. This enables code formatting, autocomplete, snippets, and syntax highlighting*. Further information and setup guide: https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols.

1. Clone OLS repo to your PC

git clone https://github.com/DanielGavin/ols

1. Build OLS

cd ols
./build.sh

1. Configure OLS to your editor

{
  "languageserver": {
    "odin": {
      "command": "ols",
      "filetypes": ["odin"],
      "rootPatterns": ["ols.json"]
    }
  }
  "coc.preferences.formatOnSaveFiletypes": [
    "odin"
  ]
}

1. In every Odin project, put these files on the root of your project:

ols.json

{
  "collections": [
    { "name": "core", "path": "c:/path/to/Odin/core" },
    { "name": "shared", "path": "c:/path/to/MyProject/src" }
  ],
  "enable_semantic_tokens": false,
  "enable_document_symbols": true,
  "enable_hover": true,
  "enable_snippets": true
}

odinfmt.json

{
  "character_width": 80,
  "tabs": false,
  "tabs_width": 2
}

1. Your project must look like this:

|- project-name
   |- odinfmt.json
   |- ols.json
   |- ... (other files)

Editor setup (Neovim)

1. Install Odin Plugin

Plug  'Tetralux/odin.vim'

1. Configure Odin spacing

By default, tab is 8 space width which I personally like to have it more compact

autocmd Filetype odin set shiftwidth=4

Starting a new project

1. Make a new folder for your project

mkdir hellope
cd hellope

1. Put your odinfmt.json and ols.json to the folder
2. Initialize git repo

git init

1. Make a .gitignore file

# This ignore the build artifacts produced from running/building the Odin source code
*.bin
*.o

1. Make a main.odin file in src folder

This helps to structure your project better

mkdir src
touch src/main.odin

1. Edit the main.odin file

package main

import "core:fmt"

main :: proc() {
  fmt.println("Hellope, 世界！")
}

1. Run the project

odin run src/

Resources to keep

Odin Overview: Starting place if you are not familiar with the Odin’s syntax
Odin Package Documentation: Everything else you need beside learning the syntax

Cool project to checkout

EmberGen

A real-time volumetric fluid simulator to create a stunning fire, smoke, and explosions. Used by Bethesda, CAPCOM, Codemasters, THQNordic, Warner Bros, Weta Digital, and many others. Written fully in Odin.

WASM4

A language-agnostic fantasy console using WASM. It has an out-of-box support for Odin.

Odin Vendor Library Collection

These are the currently available vendor libraries from Odin: raylib, glfw, sdl2, OpenEXRCore, OpenGL, ggpo, directx, miniaudio, wasm, botan, ENet, microui, vulkan, darwin, portmidi, stb.

Raylib

https://www.raylib.com/

TODO.

GLFW

TODO.

SDL2

TODO.

OpenEXRCore

TODO.

OpenGL

TODO.

GGPO

TODO.

DirectX

TODO.

Miniaudio

TODO.

WASM

TODO.

Botan

C++ cryptography library released under BSD License. TODO.

ENet

Higher level networking such as authentication, lobbying, server discovery, encryption, and other similar task. TODO.

MicroUI

A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C. TODO.

Vulkan

TODO.

Darwin

TODO.

PortMidi

Cross-Platform MIDI IO. TODO.

STB

Single-file public domain libraries.

TODO.

License

CC-BY-SA-4.0