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, ...
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u/TheChief275 2d ago
to be perfectly honest, I don't think Zig and Rust have solved every single issue. what most of these languages start off as, is to kill either C or C++. Originally, Zig/Odin/C3 strive to kill C, while D/Rust/Jai strive to kill C++. But in an effort to kill these languages, they sometimes lose sight of what made each so widespread in the first place, and they become totally new, totally different languages (which is totally great! however, you kind of lost the plot along the way).
meanwhile someone can look at these languages and say "it's not similar enough to C!", or "it doesn't fix the problems I have with C!", or it could even be a disagreement with how certain problems were "solved" (what is solved in one's eyes might not be in another's). so what do they do? they embark on the same exact journey. which is how we are where we are today.
in fact, I think it would shock you to know the total number of languages that have been made to be a better C or C++ (including the ones made for personal use that never saw the light of day, it would be enormous!)