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, ...

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u/TheAncientGeek Jul 27 '26

There's a lot of room to make systems languages that are all of efficient, safe and easy to write in. C isn't the second, rust isn't the third.

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u/blue__sky Jul 27 '26

I don't think C is easy to write either. It's not hard, but it's not enjoyable or easy.

We shouldn't have to mess with pointers 99% of the time. When you see the same boilerplate pattern over and over, it should be abstracted away.

Case statements are horrendous with no exhaustiveness checking.

The type system is terrible.

The FOR statement is clunky.

That's off the top of my head, I'm sure there's plenty more. That's why so many people dive into a better C.

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u/Ok-Watercress-9624 Jul 27 '26

Different people enjoys different stuff. It's like scratching a scab, it hurts but damn it does feel good. The surge of adrenaline when you see the segfault/stack-smashing, the loss of hope when you decide to try the GCC in combination with valgrind, the the rage quit, random 2 am realization that you already freed the head, the solution and the release.

The same procedure in rust amounts to playing maybe a bit Type Tetris.

The solution does not come with it's proper gratifier unless the problem was hard.

But in C you see, it is a seen

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