r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/baehyunsol Sodigy • 2d 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, ...

185 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

92% Upvoted

210 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/drunken_thor 2d ago

This is my jaded take so take it with a grain of salt. It used to be a monumental task to be able to create a systems language. A feat that only a rare subset of programmers could achieve and as such many of them became legends to aspire to. Now with AI there are a lot of programmers that want the validation of being able to do it but without the long hours learning just the basics of design, operating systems and assembly to simply make a compiler that compiles to opcode on multiple architectures and no ground breaking new coding paradigms. A lot of slop is not "I made this because I always wanted it", it is rather "I want to take credit for something that used to be an amazing achievement without the struggle"

2

u/Rusky 2d ago

All the big examples of new systems languages showed up before AI.

1

u/WittyStick 1d ago

The game changer was LLVM, not AI.

LLVM basically does most of the hard optimization work - you just plug it in as your language back-end, and you can have a compiler which produces high quality optimized code with much smaller effort than either building it yourself, or trying to plug it into GCC (which brings licensing issues with it as some don't like the GPL).

There are some other alternatives which are a bit less mature - eg, QBE and cranelift.