A NES emulator written in Odin (lucypero.com)
104 points by frostbyte7 11 hours ago
Dwedit 15 minutes ago
How does Odin compare with C++, Zig, or Beef?
andyfilms1 5 minutes ago
C-like performance with a lot of modern conveniences and fairly straightfoward syntax. Lots of vendored libraries included. Makes worse burgers than beef.
boltzmann64 8 hours ago
i love odin.
- manual memory management
- arena and pool allocators
- go style err!=nill style exception handling
- first class support for soa and vectorized simd, linear algebra and swizzling
- sanely typed and namespaces
- explicit unambigious overloading, subroutine context
- first class support for defer statements
- zero friction C ffi
if you haven't heard of odin, you should definitely consider it.
jazzypants 7 hours ago
> - go style err!=nill style exception handling
Is this not widely considered to be the ugliest part of the language? Why do you prefer having to do this manually?
iaaan 6 hours ago
As someone who is primarily a Go dev, I never understood this criticism and have never seen a language do it any better (but I'm open to suggestions). I think try/catch is worse. I kinda like JS's promise syntax with the `.then()` and `.catch()`, but it doesn't appear that different to Go's approach.
sn9 4 hours ago
vips7L 5 hours ago
Tadpole9181 3 hours ago
ixwt 7 hours ago
It is, which is why the or_return[1] keyword was created.
[1]: https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#or_return-operator
wolttam 5 hours ago
Errors as values instead of some special language construct is generally a nice thing (IMO)
vips7L 5 hours ago
christophilus 8 hours ago
LLMs are pretty good at it, too. I recently had Haiku rewrite all of my Quickshell Linux UIs (dux) to Odin + an immediate mode GUI library: launcher, Niri bar, WiFi manager, process manager, lock screen, HUD audio/brightness, etc. Did all but the process manager in a day, while I was spending 99% of my time paying attention to my day job.
Anyway, Odin is my favorite of the new systems languages. Lightweight, ergonomic, decent stdlib. It’s quite good.
christophilus 5 hours ago
For the record, the library I used was Skald[0]. It's decent. Not 100% fully featured yet, but performant and fairly low resource, especially compared to Quickshell.
DASD 8 hours ago
What's the decision-making in choosing Odin over something similar like C3 or Zig?
Verdex 7 hours ago
I can't speak for the implementor. And for that matter I also don't know what facilities c3 and zig provide.
However Odin comes prepackaged with a lot of bindings for helpful 3rd party libraries. Likely makes this sort of work a lot less tedious.
vconnor 6 hours ago
I have tried all three, and I chose Odin because I prefer the syntax (especially over Zig) and the vendored libraries are a killer feature for me. You get a lot of graphics, maths and gamedev-adjacent packages with the language, that can take you very far without having to shop for third-party packages.
Odin for me is the (low level) systems language nirvana, along with Elixir which is my distributed system nirvana. They spark so much joy.
fuzztester an hour ago
maybe stability or completeness?
C3 and Zig are still evolving. Not sure about Odin. Check it.
varispeed 2 hours ago
Why not just use C?
phplovesong 6 hours ago
Did not C3 basically render Odin useless? Its basically C that did not stagnate in the mid 90s.
typicode 2 hours ago
The hardware from this era is always super interesting. Having circuitry in cartridges + in the console is wild when you think about it.
Nice to see other languages being used :)
AdmiralAsshat 7 hours ago
It's always interesting when the article title betrays the author's origins. I assume the author speaks British English rather than American English, because they tended to pronounce "NES" and "SNES" as acronyms ("Ness" and "Sness"), while we Americans tended to treat them as initialisms ("En-ee-ess"). So to my American eyes, I would have expected "An NES emulator" instead of "A NES emulator."
forgotpwd16 7 hours ago
Could also be native vs non-native English speaker. Especially in computing world, it's common for non-native English speakers to utilize American spelling/punctuation while grammar/pronunciation is influenced by their native language. This appears in this post, and, arguably, even the title. In many languages (incl. Spanish, probably author's native language) acronyms are read phonetically.
hobo123 3 hours ago
I've also read people refer to the "Super Nintendo".
My friends and I in Germany always called them Nes and Super Nes.
dwb 6 hours ago
I always heard it “nez” and “snez” actually (south western England)
masfuerte 4 hours ago
And in the Midlands. Ness is Nessie's home.
HeavyRain266 6 hours ago
Author is Argentinian, I guess they teach British English in schools out there.
cubefox 6 hours ago
Yeah in Argentina they probably teach the kids that NES is pronounced "ness" during English lessons.
fuzztester 34 minutes ago
Related: What are other C-like or systems programming languages other than Odin, Zig, C3 and Hare?
I have checked out all 4 some, only by reading the docs and examples so far.
Uneasy about Zig because of docs lagging code, and syntax.
Hare is Linux only. Doable, but prefer Windows too.
Need to try Odin.
Other interesting langs in this space whih are at a somewhat usable state, including docs and libs? I don't need a package manager or an LSP or much other tooling.
For now this is just for developing small apps of my own.
anthk 8 hours ago
Odin needs too recent LLVM versions to work. A pity this Reticulum client it's written on that, because if it were written in Go it would be instantly portable to legacy machines:
https://github.com/Quad4-Software/Ren-TUI
Reticulum in Go:
https://github.com/Quad4-Software/Reticulum-Go
On Odin itself, it looks really simple, and I'd love it if it were self-bootstrapable or compilable with just a C99 compiler like cparser, cproc or TCC.
reilly3000 5 hours ago
Among all of those interesting learnings, I suspect they will soon be learning the legal code too. Nintendo of America defends its IP ferociously and too excess.
luxurytent 5 hours ago
What can Nintendo do if someone builds an emulator?
segfaltnh 4 hours ago
Yeah this is true all the other emulator authors are in jail.
Source: onion article
debo_ 5 hours ago
Yes, Nintendo famous for hunting down hobbyist NES emulators. Give me a break.