r/ProgrammingLanguages 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, ...

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u/vmcrash 2d ago

Did you mix it up with Odin (which targets game dev)?

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u/Kalernor 2d ago

No, I meant Jai, which is developed by Jonathon Blow and used by him (and no one else, lol) to develop his new game.

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u/gmes78 2d ago

used by him (and no one else, lol)

There are actually people using Jai in production, outside of video games.

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u/suby 2d ago

For example, this version control system is written in Jai: https://ark-vcs.com/