- Author
- gingerBill (Ginger Bill)
- Published
- 2026-08-20
- Kind
- Language designer's blog post, a design rationale with code examples
- Original
- www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/08/20/designing-odins-inline-asm/
- Subject
- Compilers and interpreters
- Themes
- Saying it exactly, Close to the machine
What it is
gingerBill is the creator of Odin and writes about its design. This post is in a series on syntax. It sets out Odin's asm templates. It argues they are the best in any language.
What it says
- gingerBill says GCC and Clang treat assembly as strings. The compiler understands almost nothing in them.
- The post argues assembly is not untyped. Each instruction has valid operand forms, widths and clobbers.
- Odin uses one syntax for all instruction sets, with destination first like most ISAs.
- Odin has multiple return values. Instructions such as cpuid and div map onto asm templates directly.
- The compiler checks each instruction against rexcode tables. Errors appear at the offending token.
- The post says most clobbers are inferred. It says the feature took about 7 days to build.
- gingerBill says asm templates are restricted hygienic macros, and will replace some platform-specific intrinsics.
What evidence it gives
The post gives code samples in GCC, MSVC, Turbo Pascal and Odin syntax. It describes the rexcode tables as round-tripped against llvm-mc and other tools. It reports no benchmarks, and no other language was tested.
Interests and limits
The author designed Odin and is judging the design. The claim of best in any language is stated as belief. It was not tested. The rexcode library covers many architectures, but inline assembly needs only those Odin targets.
Connections
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- Structural Backpressure Beats Smarter Agents. GCC passes inline assembly along as a string it barely understands. Brooks says prompt rules have similar standing: followed often, not reliably. gingerBill checks instructions against tables, and Brooks generates guard types. Both move a promise into something a machine can refuse.
- A mathematical formalisation of dimensional analysis. Tao says dimensional consistency catches errors and reveals the form of laws. gingerBill says assembly already has types: operand forms and widths. In both, the structure existed before anyone checked it. A checker only shows what the domain already enforced.