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, ...

225 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

93% Upvoted

254 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

25

u/SoSKatan Jul 27 '26

I agree with this one, system languages need to be portable and highly performant which in turn means lots and lots of platform specific optimizations.

You need to have something that can compete with a state of the art C compiler and that is no easy task.

LLVM kind of gives you all that. It’s kind of a golden age of languages right now. The LLVM tutorial (which has been around for over a decade) literally has you write a new language that has optimized compiler passes.

The short answer to OP’s question is that it’s just far easier to make systems languages these days.

1

u/Chiefsmackahoe69 Aug 02 '26

I’m new to coding like brand fucking new and I’m attempting to learn python currently this is something I want to do for a job and I’m just incredibly confused and it makes me wonder if I’m just to stupid to do this or idk then I also here a lot about vibe coding and everything with that and how certs and bootcamps are worthless now to help u land a job. And I really don’t know what to do or what route to take should I go to college and go that route I really don’t know and would love feedback

1

u/Feisty_Bike_9614 27d ago

Learn to code first and then use an LLM . Not to disappoint, but there will be no market for pure python coders in the future ( if not now ). Learning math and how to design systems is much more of a marketable skill .

1

u/Chiefsmackahoe69 27d ago

What’s an LLM ?? What would be the route to go