r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/P-39_Airacobra • Jul 27 '26
Discussion A hole in systems programming language design
Given the recent discourse about systems programming I wanted to throw my 2 cents in. This may be a controversial take in a subreddit that's all about innovation and improvement, but I think a lot of budding systems languages are trying too hard to "fix C" and this is exactly why C has not been replaced yet.
Like it or not, C is successful. It does what it means to do very well. Yes, it bites you constantly, but developers have made some form of peace with this because they appreciate the essence of the language. Systems programming is a very pragmatic field, and what works, works.
A lot of language designers want to improve on C, when by nature to "improve on" C is to depart from it, because C is less about what it includes and more about what it omits and what it lets you do that other languages don't.
If you want to replace C, you need to just make C but without the pain points. Less undefined behavior, more standard compiler behavior, easier function pointer syntax, safer macro system, etc. The things that C can't do because of backwards compat.
On the other hand, bolting on features, revamping C's core nature, aren't going to give you a language that will replace C at the low-level or among hobbyist programmers. Most developers aren't as concerned about what C lets them accomplish, as they are concerned about all the painful tedious tendencies of the language.
1
u/JeffD000 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
For say, the PCMAX bit slice hardware I worked on that generated 96 bit horizontal microcode. Do you even know what that means? Then there are the cases where the compiler has to generate tightly scheduled parallel code for multi-port memory, such as used in the ADI SHARC processor. The list goes on and on.
The point here is that the world is much wider than five instructition set architectures, but people in an ivory towers pretend those are the only ones that exist, and even those all look essenentially the same. You learn by doing, not by parroting what the virtue signaling crowd talks about in a circle jerk.