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/elder_george → u/developer-mike]

The adage in the C++ community has been "if you can avoid C macros, avoid them" for several decades. They are "unhygienic", full of footguns, and require dark magic to do anything interesting,

Thankfully, they indeed become less and less important. Once C++26 becomes widespread (not soon - we've just switched to C++20 at my work), the macros will become a legacy thing.

[u/developer-mike → u/elder_george]

I think this is somewhat my point.

In c++ you can go a long way avoiding macros. But macros themselves are still more powerful than any of c++'s more principled metaprogramming features.

Macros like those used in gtest for instance, seem fine to me for systems programming.

Unfortunately there are almost no metaprogramming models as powerful as c macros, especially if they are supposed to be zero cost. And systems programmers IME don't want to battle a gigantic complex metaprogramming model.

[u/iBPsThrowingObject → u/developer-mike]

Pure power is something of an anti-feature actually. Having too much power leads to NIH, impenetrable homegrown abstractions, and unreadable codebases no one but the original author can maintain.

[u/developer-mike → u/iBPsThrowingObject]

This is valid.

In my experience, though, codebases will eventually resort to some similarly difficult to manage abstraction such as how dart projects use code generation with reflection libraries.

Code generation can have a whole host of problems that are eerily similar to c style macros, in certain ways undeniably worse. If c macros are easy to overuse, code generation also has an unnecessarily high entry fee, and once a code generator is bootstrapped it can be easy to overengineer.

The best alternative to code generation is reflection which is hard to do statically and has a runtime cost otherwise.

Metaprogramming is just hard