Hello Sailor!

In this article, we will be setting up a project folder and The Odin compiler thinks in terms of directory-based packages. In order to create a new program in Odin, we need to first create a new directory in which the source for this program will live. In Windows, just create a folder anywhere you want to on your computer. Without any further ado, let's just jump into the code.

---

package main

import "core:fmt"

main :: proc() {
    fmt.println("Hello Sailor!")
}

Compiling and Running the Program

Copy the above code into a text file and save it to your project folder. This file doesn't need to have any particular name, but as a useful convention, I would recommend naming your main file for a project as "main.odin". Now, open a windows terminal or powershell window in your project's directory. (shift + right click inside the folder in Windows Explorer) You need to make sure that your active directory is indeed the project directory.
Now, run the command odin run . This will compile and run the program, which shouldn't take any time at all. If you see the words "Hello, Sailor!" printed to the console, then congratualtions! You've just compiled and run your first program in Odin!

Understanding the Program

Package Declarations

Odin code is organized in terms of 'packages'. Packages are essentially standalone units or modules of code that provide some cohesive peice of functionality. A program is made up of one or more packages that are linked together during the compilation process. A package declaration is required at the top of every single Odin source code file. Generally, if a package is being built as a library, the package name should match the name of the library or be an abbreviation of the library's name if the library has a long name. For a standalone program, the main package is generally named as such, though this is not a requirement.

Import Statements

An import statement is used to import code from one package for use in another. In this case, we import the "fmt" package (short for "format") from the core library. The format package provides use with procedures for formatting text and printing it out to the console.
Odin is distributed with two special libraries, "core" and "vendor". The core libraries provide a lot of basic functionality that most programs will need. The vendor libraries contain libraries from third-party sources. While many of these are very useful as well, we probably will not have any need for these in this series.

Main Procedure

The 'main' procedure is the entry point for every Odin program. This where our program starts executing, and when the main procedure ends, the program is complete. Our main procedure in the program above only contains one line of code, a call to the 'println' (short for 'print line') procedure from the 'fmt' package. We pass println a string that we want to print out to the console and it does all of the work required behind the scenes to make this happen.