What kinds of project would Odin be best suited for, as compared to, say, Rust or Go?
So for any sort of visual engine development (game engines being the most obvious, but also applications like blender or the JangaFx suite which is the main user of Odin), it is great. What you need is just there ready to go.
The language design itself is very much oriented around appealing to people who do this sort of work.
Other than there isn't much to the language really. It lacks a "big idea" feature like Rust's lifetimes or Zig's comptime. The closest thing to a "big idea" is the rejection of package managers but that's not really part of the language.
It's pleasant to use and compiles fast. Hard to complain.
Go really only took off thanks to Docker and Kubernetes, and even if it would be capable, there is hardly an ecosystem there.
Rust could be there, but there is really only Bevy, and several companies have tried it and pivoted to something else due to compile times hindering fast prototyping workflows.
Odin was created at a games company, JangaFX, and has already a few products using it.
Also Odin batteries include what you need to start coding a game right away, https://pkg.odin-lang.org/vendor
And just to clarify, personally, I would not describe JangaFX as a game company myself (as you pointed out, they aren't in the game business per se, but the visual effects business) - I'm just trying to clarify why the claim isn't completely outlandish.
A caterer that only caters to oil camps isn't suddenly in the oil business, for example. To take an easier to understand example.
Or my brother in law runs a company that does CNC machining and sells to Airbus. He's not suddenly an aircraft manufacturer, even though his parts make it onto planes.
Semantically it's quite C-like, but it's got some nice modern features like a real module system (Odin calls it packages), a project-aware compiler (no build system needed, just run "odin build ." in your project root), fast compile times, and some nice quality of life stuff (good string type, good maths library, built in array maths, some nice built in stuff for memory management). It's also fast. Like in the same ballpark as C, C++ or Rust.
It's basically a modern C replacement.
Rust is shockingly good at being a general purpose language, but that's in the face of the strict semantics of the language and approach to memory. There became a comparison against Go because Go offers strong performance and a complete opposite memory-management experience (in having a GC that largely solves it for you.) Odin sits between these two levels of friction, leaning far more on the Go side of things. There are goodies in Odin which make memory management much breezier than other manual languages, but I'll admit it is still a task you are expected to complete.
So that's the story on the memory-management effort. That aside, I'd say Odin is best for interactive applications where a GC is not an option. Although at this point it comes out of my hands so easily that I'd probably write Odin in some situations where it'd be less optimal, and it'd be fun so why not?
https://www.swift.org/install/linux/
See:
"A series of small programs/tasks to compare C++, Go, Zig, Odin, D, Janet, Swift, Nim and C# to see which I like the most"
EDIT: Actually Typescript is more distracting than Swift. I could spend days toying with the type-checker to make the program sturdier against one change or another.
That may sound like "Q:why buy this truck? A:Cos it has a nice oil filter" but it marketed as a language "[for the] joy of programming".
Perhaps the goal is to get more people into programming following the same playbook as the scripting wars we had in the 2000s. Or it's part of a larger trend to get mind-share away from c.