It's a good language, you should try it out as well.

(Funny story, I seem to have a bout of visual migraine at the moment and misread your comment until just now and had to remove what I wrote).

I didn't mean to give the impression that I'm putting down Zig. It's more that I've noticed that people tend to frame problems differently with Zig than with Odin.

To explain what I mean by framing, consider OO vs procedural and the way OO will frame the problem as objects with behaviour that interact, and procedural will frame the problem as functions being invoked mutating data.

The difference isn't at all that stark between Odin and Zig, but it's present nonetheless. And clearly Zig is doing something which a lot of people like enjoy. It's just that the person using Zig seems to enjoy different aspects of programming (and it seems to me be in the spirit of "the challenge of finding an optimal solution") than the person using Odin.

If I would have liked, I could have done something like `import std::io::file as file;` but I noticed that we keep getting this issue that we’re renaming things all of the time, and usually in the same way. This is why path shortening is there. To directly get something like the informal `file_open` namespacing in C programs.

Did you know that Wikipedia editors will aggressively remove Wiki entries about less known languages. There are already several wiki articles on Odin by various authors that have been removed over the years.

Talking about GitHub numbers, we can look at VLang, which had an astronomical trajectory initially due to overpromising and selling a language that would solve long standing issues such as no manual memory management but no GC needed etc.

Such viral popularity creates a different trajectory from organically growing word of mouth such as in the Odin case.

Vlang also has a Wikipedia page.

Is this then proof that it is a viable alternative to the general public? This is what you argue.

Blake2 and other hashes are most welcome.

As for HashMap you are completely correct: there are many different types of maps that are needed. Concurrent maps, insertion ordered maps etc. And even variations of the small things: are keys copied or not!

I talked about this on a stream recently, how the standard library is in need of a lot of additional Maps, Sets and Lists.

So if you’re interested in contributing then you’re very welcome to do so.