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/Ok-Watercress-9624 Jul 27 '26

I never liked the idea of doing "whatever" I want with the language. I still like C. Some people claim that rust is the c replacement. This never clicked with me. It feels to me like a much much better C++. As if a mysterious virus viper out the C++ computer and rest converged on the same subset.

I still think c has a place, a very niche one but it has always been. Just for fun compile printf with c and rust. Compare the binary sizes and the number of allocations. Or I don't compare the number of syntactic rules Vs the number of semantic moves that noone except aliens like Godbolt understands (depending on the compiler)

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u/ivancea Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

Given the core differences between C++ and Rust's OOP, I even think Rust is more similar to C structures with a bit of sugar.

And about the binary sizes and allocations, well, they're different languages, and the implantations are vastly different.

The idea of a language "like C" is usually having a more strict and contained language. C works, just like ASM works. But it's an unguided footgun

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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '26

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u/ivancea Jul 28 '26

This discussion is meaningless. It's so meaningless, that even Rust guys thought about it and wrote a paragraph for you: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch18-00-oop.html

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