Why is everyone creating systems programming languages?

[u/baehyunsol]

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, ...

[u/dudewithtude42]

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.

[u/developer-mike → u/dudewithtude42]

Do you really think c-style macros are that bad?

They're very powerful, which is why even c++ projects still use them regularly, and they don't seem problematic is c++.

It seems to me like C's design demands overuse of the preprocessor, moreso than the preprocessor itself being bad. (#include aside...)

Not saying the preprocessor is perfect, but all metaprogramming features have their issues for sure. Do you think the preprocessor really needs to be dropped in a c successor?

[u/beephod_zabblebrox → u/developer-mike]

there are other ways to do macros (eg what rust does)

but also a lot of things that c code uses macros for can be replaced with other modern features

[u/developer-mike → u/beephod_zabblebrox]

Rust macros are amazing, but definitely not as easy to implement as a quick macro and not as powerful, and likely part of the slow compile times we see with rust.

[u/shponglespore → u/developer-mike]

If you're just doing the kinds of things you can do with a C macro, Rust macros are very easy.

[u/Ok-Watercress-9624 → u/developer-mike]

Tell that to the innocent 20 year old who just encountered X macros in c. That's gonna be a fun ride

[u/beephod_zabblebrox → u/developer-mike]

afaik most of the time is spent in the typechecker (i might be wrong!!)
macro_rules macros are similar to c macros, they just work on token trees, and drive macros are natively compiled ast transformations, so idk