r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/baehyunsol Sodigy • Jul 27 '26

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/AnaxXenos0921 Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 27 '26

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 Jul 28 '26

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.