Learning: Odin Programming Language

Streamed on 2024-12-27 (https://www.twitch.tv/thediscouragerofhesitancy)

OBS had some sort of malfunction at around hour 3:40 and there is no audio after that point. Sorry.

I've wanted to take the odin programming language for a test drive and today is the day. I scanned through some of the odin information on the webpage. Compared to the zig webpage documentation from yesterday, the odin documentation was much better.

I tried to install odin, and while at first it seemed to be going well it all kind of fell apart once we tried to compile an odin program. It turns out that odin requires Visual Studio on Windows. I followed the instructions on the webpage but couldn't get it to work. In the end I followed a secondary set of instructions from the webpage. I had to add more things to the PATH variable and remove/change other things from the first attempt, but eventually we were able to build odin from the source and get it to run correctly. The caveat is that when I create a shell I still have to run everything from the Windows command line (not bash like I normally do) and there is a step to initialize the environment. I'm not a big fan. One point to zig for not requiring Visual Studio and just working after unzipping.

With the odin compiler working it was time to move on to Advent of Code for 2019. I worked my way through Day 1 without too much trouble. Some nice-to-haves weren't working for me in odin (atoi for example), but nothing major. I realized after completeing Day 1 that OBS had semi-frozen and the stream wasn't working, so you can't see the complete solution in this video. Sorry about that.