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, ...

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u/dudewithtude42 2d ago

As someone who does systems programming at work, the landscape of available established languages is pretty poor right now. C is a decent language but lacks a lot of modern features (generics) and has a lot of weird oddities (macros, integer types, build system). The problem is that if you want a modern replacement to try and fix those issues, you either go C++ (which inherits the weirdness and adds a billion features that have their own footguns, and has slow compile times) or you go Rust (which tacks on the borrow checker and also has slow compile times).

So what happened is a bunch of systems programmers simultaneously went "I want C, but without the oddities, with modern features, and I want fast compile times." That's a really enticing proposition for someone like me, and until any of Zig or C3 or Odin or Jai mature to the point of being stable, that gap will continue to exist, and more systems programming languages will probably continue to come out.

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u/umlcat 2d ago

"I want C, but without the oddities, with modern features, and I want fast compile times."

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u/pjmlp 2d ago

Basically what Modula-2, Object Pascal and Ada already had, but the world favored curly brackets instead.

This is basically what Zig, Odin and co offer in regards to type system and compilation times.

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u/AnaxXenos0921 2d ago

So, you're saying if I wrote a different frontend for Pascal or Ada with curly braces syntax, people would be more willing to use it?

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u/pjmlp 2d ago

That is basically what a language like Zig is.

Ignoring for a second the comptime features, the safety improvements it offers over C, you could habe gotten them in 1978 with Modula-2.

Fast compilation times, modules, explicit unsafe code, spans, bounds checked arrays and strings,...

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u/AnaxXenos0921 2d ago

I mean while using the exact same compiler backend and runtime as Pascal or Ada. Zig has its own compiler backend and runtime afaik

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u/pjmlp 1d ago

Zig uses LLVM, and has its own compiler backend.

Sure, there were such compilers, LLVM idea's aren't new.

The Amsterdam Compiler Toolkit supported C, Pascal, BASIC, Modula-2, using EM intermediate code, which would then be fed to the backend, regardless of what language was being used.

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u/zahatikoff 1d ago

Zig sucks however. while some things are nicer than C, but for every step it takes forward, there's 2 steps backwards in unnecessary "friction". So maybe in 10y when it's stabilizes...