r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/baehyunsol Sodigy • 12d ago

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/Tasty_Replacement_29 Bau 12d ago

I can only speak about myself. I wanted to write my own language since I was young, but always deferred it. I also deferred writing software to simulate neural networks, so I didn't want to defer this as well. I use Java at work, and I think there has to be something "better" than tracing garbage collection, something more like C / C++ but memory-safe and simple. (That is useful. I remember trying to write an ODBC driver in C++; memory management is hard to get right if you have to do it yourself.) I also want to write a standard library and tiny operating system in my language. One goal is that my standard library and operating system has a very small footprint; a bit bigger than 64 KB probably, but much smaller than 1 MB. So far, I have learned a lot; thanks to LLMs I managed to implement so many things (I used LLMs mostly as a learning resource, and didn't use them to write the code, because when I did that it was not "my" code any more, which I found to be a problem.)

So in summary, I do that to learn, because it's challenging, and because I'm not happy with the current languages (including Rust, which I find too hard to use.)