before reading the article, i have to say that odin won't make it unless it will invest serious time into networking. graphics, which is where odin shines, is very niche market and i bet that once JB's Jai comes to public, it might crush odin in this field by sheer persona behind the language in this specific niche. what makes or breaks language is the ecosystem and abilities to use it in various domains. today, the internet/networking moves mountains. it's where the most engineering and money is. if you cannot write fast http/rest/grpc servers with most used databases, your language will fade away into obsolescence, because it might bring nice new features, but if it cannot be used in the most popular fields, it will not make it. and odin is suffering in this aspect tremendously. it has the simple go-inspired syntax going on, but it has no oop/methods, so right there you have an obstacle for new users - it is too different from the norm. it might have great integration with various graphics libraries but it if is too different and lacks the ecosystem of libraries, package manager... there is no reason for it to exist. it also requires GIGABYTES of crap you need to download on windows in order to be able to compile a program. it also needs IDE support, mostly jetbrains, visual studio and vs code, which are the dominant IDEs today. in short, if it lacks convenience of Go or Zig, or even Rust, there really is no point in investing time into it.<p>PS: this is just off the cuff comment, not too thought out. also, Odin has a chance to beat Zig, due to better syntax and being essentially complete, beside having official spec. Which is not the case of Zig. Zig has traction but lacks in areas where Odin does not. So I would focus on Zig as the competitor, Rust as second. The simplified go-like syntax is one of the main selling points. But there must be more to the language.<p>PPS: I think the choice of ^ to handle pointers is one of the worst decision in the syntax. The * and & are the norm and should not be messed with.