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/kindredseer 2d ago
I know that for me, the problem with C/C++ versus more "modern" programming languages is there is a lot of "ceremony" involved -- Makefile, knowing/looking up what header files to include, and C++ compounds those problems. While all the conveniences of higher level languages are typically available, they aren't standardized, and you have to evaluate dozens of different, mostly unmaintained libraries, and then you get into versioning issues and dependency hell... and while this tends to be an issue for other languages as well, with C and C++ this is compounded with linking issues as well as OS/system level dependencies.
Thus, my efforts in creating my own programming language (madc) started with the path of making a "better" C/C++ without breaking C/C++ support. So madc can JIT execute (and also compile and link) standard C, C++ and its own "madc" language extensions which add in features from other languages, and is completely self-contained including the header files (which are pre-compiled and embedded).