Is Odin Just a More Boring C?

Summary

Saturday, October 4, 2025 Is Odin Just a More Boring C? Exploring Odin Through a Tiny Key-Value Store with Pub/Sub Why I Tried Odin Background My recent posts have been diving deep into Zig and C, a shift from my earlier focus on React and JavaScript. This isn’t a pivot but a return to my roots. I started programming at 13 with C and C++, and over the years, I’ve built a wide range of projects in systems programming languages like C, C++, Rust, and now Zig. From hobby experiments and custom Linux utilities to professional embedded systems work think vehicle infotainment, tracking solutions, and low-level components I’ve always been drawn to the power and precision of systems programming. Alongside this, I’ve crafted tools for my own environment and tackled plenty of backend engineering, blending my full-stack expertise with a passion for low-level control. Why Odin Caught My Eye I like many others initially dismissed Odin as that language that was primarily intended for game development. It took me a moment or should I say many moments to realize just how stupid that notion was. Because let’s analyze what game development actually means, it means building complex systems that need to be efficient, performant and reliable. It means working with graphics, physics, input handling, networking and more. It means dealing with concurrency, memory management and low level optimizations. In other words, game development is a perfect fit for a systems programming language like Odin. So basically if it’s intended for game development, then it should be a great fit for general systems programming, desktop applications and since game dev usually means manual memory management without a garbage collector, it should also be possible to some extent to use it for embedded systems. So after I’ve gave myself a good slap on the forehead for being a bit of an idiot. I decided why not give Odin a fair shot and build something useful with it. The Project Now I may have been a bit liberal ...