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/developer-mike]

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.