Introduction

I am currently making a game using Odin. It is developed on Linux, but cross-compilation is not supported yet, so I have to use Windows, whether I like it or not.

Unfortunately, installation on Windows is quite different from Linux, and tutorials about it aren’t specific about the exact tools to install.

Note that I am on Windows 10, and I won’t compile from source.

Installing Visual Studio

First, download the Visual Studio installer, preferably the latest Community version.

Start the installer, and when it asks you to choose the components to install, scroll and select Desktop development in C++.

Keep only the first option (C++ compiler) and Windows 10 (or 11, depending on your Windows version) SDK. Choose the latest, it doesn’t matter if versions don’t match exactly.

Using Odin

You can download the latest release here. Extract the zip to a specific folder (for instance, C:\Odin).

Checking if it works

Create the following program and save it as the file main.odin :

1package main
2
3import "core:fmt"
4
5main :: proc() {
6  fmt.println("Hellope!")
7}

Now to run it, you have to open “x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS2022” (type it on the Windows search bar), then go to the folder path in which your Odin file is.

To do so, type cd path\to\main.odin (naturally, replace path\to by the path of your odin file).

Then path\to\odin run main.odin.

For example, if your Odin executable is in the folder C:\Odin, then you will write :

C:\Odin\odin run main.odin

Add Odin compiler to the path

It works, but it is annoying to type C:\Odin\odin every time I want to call the compiler. Wouldn’t it be better if you could simply use odin instead ?

Here are the instructions to do so.

On Windows search bar, type environment variable and choose the first option that appears. Click on the corresponding button on the bottom right.

Then, on the System variables section, look for one called Path, and double-click on it. Press New and write the path to the folder containing the executable.

Open a new command prompt (if you got one opened before adding to the path, it won’t work) and type odin. If you don’t get any error, congratulations!