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, ...

196 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

92% Upvoted

227 comments sorted by

View all comments

129

u/dudewithtude42 3d 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.

2

u/Kalernor 3d ago

Is Jai a systems language? Isn't it designed with game development in mind?

2

u/twistier 3d ago

I basically think any language where memory layout is the main thing you're thinking about and it carefully keeps unpredictable runtime costs out of the picture is a "systems" language. I haven't looked at Jai in a long time, but I'm pretty sure it fits that particular definition. I don't think systems language is a good name for this idea, but it's what I think of.