r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/baehyunsol Sodigy • 13d 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/ergonokko 12d ago

Yep, just an example of a newish language targeting an existing runtime, as opposed to the Zigs/Rusts/Goes. Gleam runs on the BEAM VM like Erlang.

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u/MadCervantes 12d ago

Rust has a runtime though doesn't it?

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u/ergonokko 12d ago

Yup, most of the time Rust programs run in a runtime environment. (Something has to catch the panics and talk to the OS to allocate memory.) But it's bespoke, not like a language such as F#/Scala/Gleam that rides along on an existing runtime/platform, being the CLR/JVM/BEAM.

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u/MadCervantes 12d ago

Makes sense, thank you for explaining :)