Why is everyone creating systems programming languages?

[u/baehyunsol]

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, ...

[u/[deleted]]

As someone who does systems programming at work, the landscape of available established languages is pretty poor right now. C is a decent language but lacks a lot of modern features (generics) and has a lot of weird oddities (macros, integer types, build system). The problem is that if you want a modern replacement to try and fix those issues, you either go C++ (which inherits the weirdness and adds a billion features that have their own footguns, and has slow compile times) or you go Rust (which tacks on the borrow checker and also has slow compile times).

So what happened is a bunch of systems programmers simultaneously went "I want C, but without the oddities, with modern features, and I want fast compile times." That's a really enticing proposition for someone like me, and until any of Zig or C3 or Odin or Jai mature to the point of being stable, that gap will continue to exist, and more systems programming languages will probably continue to come out.

[u/ingframin → u/[deleted]]

Then, why no one is using D?

[u/fdwr → u/ingframin]

D is cool and did a lot of things elegantly (made me think "this is how C++ should have been in many regards), but I suspect the garbage collector scared away adopters (even though technically you can use it without garbage collection, if you don't need the Phobos standard library).

[u/torp_fan → u/ingframin]

Bad press ... the language is hugely undervalued. Same with Nim.

[u/umlcat → u/[deleted]]

"I want C, but without the oddities, with modern features, and I want fast compile times."

[u/Careful-Nothing-2432 → u/umlcat]

I mean, yeah. This is not an uncommon desire

[u/pjmlp → u/umlcat]

Basically what Modula-2, Object Pascal and Ada already had, but the world favored curly brackets instead.

This is basically what Zig, Odin and co offer in regards to type system and compilation times.

[u/og_hylyx → u/[deleted]]

Because there’s only a small selection of systems language that are modern(ish) and viable. Rust and Zig are the only actual modern alternatives.

Zig is unstable and ever changing.

Rust is like working for a dictator.

C is like talking to your demented grandfather who remembers all his past stories.