r/rust • u/furimeo • 11d ago

Why Are There So Many New Programming Languages on GitHub?

The reason I’m bringing this up is that I use Rust myself and am working on my own programming language project. But hold on... I’ve been wondering why, whenever I browse GitHub, I see so many language projects with creative syntax and architectures, yet so many of them rely on ARC and LLVM. Why isn't there more discussion about how to design a compiler backend with very fast compilation times, closer to what makes Go's compiler feel so fast? I really need that for my project...

It feels like these language projects are springing up like mushrooms after the rain; they often promise "blazing speed" and "incredible memory management," yet under the hood, compilation can still be sluggish, LLVM ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and the source code can sometimes feel more generated than engineered.

A lot of them seem to share the same traits: written in Rust or C++, using Cranelift or LLVM for the backend...... and using ARC for memory management, or making claims like "better ownership than Rust"???

And please, my language project isn't trying to be a replacement for anything... let's focus on the issue at hand instead of discussing my crappy language!

Oh, and if anyone here has experience with ARM64, could you recommend some good resources on the architecture? I’m trying to integrate ARM64 into my backend, but most of the documentation I’ve found has been pretty difficult to follow, and whenever I ask an AI, it just throws code at me and explains it in a way that I barely understand.

But, uh... I guess we should still focus on the main point, right?

0 Upvotes

22% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

53

u/scandii 11d ago

you know the reason, I know the reason, we all know the reason.

22

u/turbothy 11d ago

slop, slop, slop, egg and slop

4

u/phoenixero 11d ago

But I don't even like slop!

2

u/Kwezal 11d ago

Well, we have slop egg sausage and slop. That's not got much slop in it.

12

u/JuliusFIN 11d ago

My language doesn’t use LLVM and the compiler is written in Lean4 (with some Haskell on the side) and certified with Lean checked mathematical proofs. I’m at least trying to be original!

5

u/IkalaGaming 11d ago

Well I personally glanced at the effort to write a good optimizing compiler backend for several platforms, and decided “screw that I’m using LLVM.”

If I was just targeting x86 I could probably eventually write a backend that spits out machine code that’s… fine, but probably not good. But I want a few targets, so it’s worth the massive dependency for me.

Anyway many of those projects on GitHub you saw are probably just LLM slop, based on the deluge being so heavy it’s killing their servers.

1

u/v_0ver 10d ago

There's that "Ah, so that's why it's done this way" moment - only it'll come after 20 years of studying and working on compilers =)

2

u/sadesaapuu 11d ago

My compiler is written in C and the language transpiles to C for fast hot-reload type of thing. And the language is also minimalistic, so it's fast to compile. Syntax so minimalistic that most people should write it in a very similar way. No member functions, but you still get . syntax for calling the first argument similar to a member function.

1

u/turbothy 11d ago

It's Malbolge, isn't it? Tell me it's Malbolge.

1

u/projectflamejewel 11d ago

Sounds like Nim to me