Removing 'using' on by default has ruined a huge part of the language.

[IRefuseToBelieveItsButter]

Went to update and hit with this, having to put a stupid directive on every file. I don't care if some people find it 'controversial' don't use the features you don't like, we do it for any other language. Or better yet why not make it a directive to opt-out if the complainers need comforting. People just don't know a good thing when they have it and will ruin it for everyone.

There's no point in fighting for it, but I'll just say I found it so useful for reasoning, and never had any issues or anything hard to track with it. But now I have to feel like I'm doing something wrong every time I use it in a new file. Bah humbug.

[gingerBill]

I understand the complaint, but it's just been empirically such a bad thing, especially when working on teams or refactoring code. It might be "fine" for the individual programmer, but it was a failure of an "experiment".

[nickav]

For what it's worth, I second this. It seems like for projects with solo developers/smaller teams this is a really handy feature.

Could this be something akin to a "house-style" that can be enabled with a compiler flag or something? Apologies if this is a naive question relative to Odin's priorities as a language, as I'm new to the language.

For example when writing entity code, it's really handy to be able to write:

player_update(using it: ^Entity) {
    position += 1;
}

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I actually came here to suggest top-level using for a similar reason, and was looking forward to using using in general. For example, I want to make a project like this:

engine/
    a.odin
    b.odin
game.odin

The problem is I want to write an "engine" library that all my game projects use. And for convenience, I would prefer to keep it in a single directory so I can just copy that around between projects. But, when I'm writing game code I want it to feel as much like I'm "in the engine" as possible (as in, have all symbols from engine available in every game file).

Currently I have a structure like this (so that all files can use the same package):

a.odin
b.odin
game.odin

So that leaves me with two, rather awkward options:

1. Prefix every "engine" file with engine_ so they can all use the same package name or

2. Every new game project should declare all the symbols somewhere, like this:

// File: engine_link.odin
import "engine"
draw_rect :: engine.draw_rect
draw_triangle :: engine.draw_triangle
// ...

With either of these approaches, as either 1) the number of engine files increases or 2) the number of engine symbols increases this becomes a little bit unwieldy.

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I understand that top-level using may be a bad idea for other reasons. But IMO it would be a shame if the using feature went away entirely.