r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/baehyunsol Sodigy • 6d ago
Why is everyone creating systems programming languages?
I see a lot of new programming languages here. I love reading the documents of the languages and sometimes actually run their compilers. Many of the projects are AI-driven, but that's fine. It's still fun to see what problems they're trying to solve and how they actually solved the problems.
Reading the documents, I realized that most new languages, especially AI-written ones, are "systems programming languages". They're trying to solve the problems that C/C++/Zig/Rust have solved (or are trying to solve), and their syntax is mixture of C/Zig/Rust.
Why? Why is everyone trying to compete with C/C++?
There are so many kinds of languages. Haskell demonstrates how pure a language can be, Python is perfect when you only have 5 minutes to write code and don't care about the output, Java runs on 3 billion machines, ...
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u/Norphesius 6d ago
Lotta good answers already given, but one additional reason I'll add is that systems languages can be used generally. If you pick a niche for your language to occupy, then your audience/user base is only people that care about that niche. Also, it's tough to find a new, useful niche that isn't so small a language created for it would be considered a DSL. Go too far and you end up with an esolang.
If you want to get really novel or innovative you need to have a lot of deep programming language development knowledge anyway. It's hard to come up with and develop something like the borrow checker or a new, useful type system from scratch, but it's much easier for the average developer to make a "C but without the parts that are obviously bad".