Lisp Interpreter with GC in <750 Lines of Odin (and <500 Lines of C)

https://odin.godbolt.org/z/8onn4hxP1

This brief example makes a hash map, then it demonstrates that if we call a sub-routine which makes its own distinct hash map, that doesn't change ours, but, once we destroy our hash map and call the sub-routine again, we can still use the variable for our (destroyed) hash map (!) but doing so reveals the contents of that other hash map from the sub-routine instead in the cases I saw.

Now, in C or C++ if you do this that's Undefined Behaviour and the symptoms I saw (and which you're likely to see if you follow the link) are just one of arbitrarily many ways that could manifest.

In Rust of course the equivalent code won't compile because the hash map is gone so we can't just go around using it after that.

And in Odin, well, as Ginger Bill has explained Odin does not have Undefined Behaviour so... this has behaviour which er, Odin has not defined ? Does that make you feel warm and tingly or do you feel like Bill just wasted time arguing semantics?

Please don't be pointlessly insulting. The description matches many people's experience.

Depends on my mood; maybe go to the Odin Reddit, Discord or CodeReview StackExchange and say "GingerBill has rejected my PR for 'many problems' can I get some hints what, so I can make a better PR?" and then take my better PR back and update the original making it as clear as I can that I have made a good faith effort to improve it.

Or wait a couple of days (weeks?) and review my code with fresh eyes (and wait for the reviewer's mood to change).

Or reply "I'd be happy for you to rewrite it better, I just want the feature it doesn't have to be my code"

Or ask "Many problems, but how many of them are dealbreakers? Is there a route to a minimally viable commit which settles on a good enough interface, and the rest of the implementation can be improved later?"

Or ask "I'd hope you can write it better, you've been Odinning a lot longer than I have, can you point out some of the problems so I can learn more?"

Or if I was giving up on getting it committed, "You say you can write it better, so are you going to?"

> "Would you not have expected at least SOMETHING as to what is wrong with it?"

I have been on the internet long enough to be on both sides of "it's nice to be nice" and "where to start it's not even wrong" and to expect busy, capable, computer people to be time crunched and terse/blunt. There's a difference between "many problems" and "many problems, Get The Fuck Out". A difference between what Linus Torvalds and Erik Naggum used to do and a 3 second glance "too many problems to commit, rejected". Have you seen the accusations of what goes on behind closed doors in the C++ standards committee? Or Scheme world?[1] Does that put you off the languages or is that fine because it only happens to other people?

Progressive disclosure could say that if you cared and wanted to fix up the PR you would have engaged and asked, and if you didn't ask that suggests you weren't interested and that saved Bill's time writing a longer comment. I guess I expect that the Thing_I_Want is not something others care about and if I want to 'change the world' I will have to push some boulders up hill to get there, or push some people to drag their attention to my thing instead of whatever they are doing, and Thing_I_Want generally is not world changing enough to warrant that.

[1] I could go and find them and link them here, but I'm not going to because you might a) know, b) not care, and if I do then I'll get dragged into HN arguments about those accusations which isn't really relevant, but your grudge would be stronger if you had many documented examples showing a pattern of rude, cruel, damaging behaviour, rather than one example which you remember as being unfairly rude but can't find.

I guess there are a few things I could do in that situation. Move on to something else, try to figure out why he didn’t like it on my own, fork the language if it’s big enough and important enough to me.

But yeah, maybe he is busy? Maybe he thinks you are capable of working it out yourself?

Not to be too harsh about it, but yeah, that’s just the way it is sometimes. Maybe he was having a bad day, that happens to people.

https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/2...

I did not personally mind Odin's exceptions, to be honest. I prefer Odin's way, and Go's way, too.

> you'll have to dig for them yourself.

Yeah I was referring to such specifics, but I will take a look at Discord perhaps.

> "Code indentation that is anything but 2, 3, 4, or 8 characters wide, is objectively a bad style from a pure aesthetics standpoint"

Those are just opinions. I prefer 2 spaces, or tab with 2 column width. I tend stick to one style in my codebase, consistently. I do not like anything longer than 2, because I have a small screen and I think it is just simply redundant. I can follow 2 column width indentation just fine. This is just my opinion. If I use tabs, people can choose their own, it is up to them.