[0]: https://inductive.no/jai/ [1]: https://github.com/Sharir/jai
*Although there has (always?) been a private alpha/beta release.
Rust and Zig developed features by cutting their teeth on large amounts of real software, not by following one guy's personal project that has no source, no library, no spec available.
Odin's creator has credited Jai as an influence. You can see him in the comments of old jai youtube videos (videos that go into a lot of depth about the language design). Odin's syntax and features are very similar to Jai, the influence is pretty clear. Odin has other influences of course but you could say it's "jai but open source".
Lastly, jai is not open source but it doesn't mean it's not available. You can message blow to get access to it. Many programmers have used it. There are third party jai libraries on github.
> Many programmers
...how many?
Lots of people have seen his talks about the language, so why do you think its impossible it influenced other languages?
Have they heard of Jai? Yeah probably. But it's barely a drop in the bucket as far as the PL design community goes.
These are orthogonal concepts. Jai can or cannot introduce ideas, and Jai can or cannot be released. As of now, it is in fact so that Jai has introduced ideas, and has been released to a closed group of beta testers.
> How can we claim to know what it did “right” when only a few projects have been built in it?
To judge whether Jai did something right, in my opinion, it suffices to read the documentation and experience someone else programming second-hand and take advantage of its offerings, namely making programming less tedious, more enjoyable, more safe. It appears to me that you set the bar of usefulness or success too high for no good reason.
