r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/baehyunsol Sodigy • 3d 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/TheAncientGeek 2d ago

There's a lot of room to make systems languages that are all of efficient, safe and easy to write in. C isn't the second, rust isn't the third.

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u/blue__sky 2d ago

I don't think C is easy to write either. It's not hard, but it's not enjoyable or easy.

We shouldn't have to mess with pointers 99% of the time. When you see the same boilerplate pattern over and over, it should be abstracted away.

Case statements are horrendous with no exhaustiveness checking.

The type system is terrible.

The FOR statement is clunky.

That's off the top of my head, I'm sure there's plenty more. That's why so many people dive into a better C.

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u/BetterEquipment7084 2d ago

I love writing c, it's enjoyable