Here’s a non-exhaustive rundown of newish systems languages. I’ll list some notable things about them related to safety and syntax as I discussed in the previous post. Well, here they are, in rough order of production readiness and popularity. Sorry if I put something lower than it deserved. While putting this list together I wondered why so many languages have gotten built recently. In part it’s that tools like llvm are just more powerful than the older compiler construction tools, but the bar for a new language has gotten higher too. Could it be the existence of LLVM ? I’m not sure – a number of these languages use C or C++ or QBE as back ends instead. I make a note on the back end for each as a point of interest. Sum types via enum and pattern matching Expressions only, no statements Borrow checker to enforce single ownership and single borrower of mutable data Lifetimes Manual memory management (but with lifetimes and borrow checking, no manual alloc or free is needed.) Good built-in threading support including memory safety for concurrent programs LLVM backend, alternative gcc, Crane-lift I shouldn’t need to say too much about Rust, it’s the big player and is the only one on this list past a 1.0 release. The ability to have non-reference counted, non-GC (so sort of manual) memory management while keeping Rust programs very memory safe and fast is the big claim to fame of Rust. But combining that with other good code safety like sum types and pattern matching makes Rust great. Safe Rust, (there can be blocks marked “unsafe” for exceptional situations,) offers a lot of practical safety. Rust is one of those languages where if you can get your code to compile there’s a good chance it won’t crash and will actually do what you intended on the first try. The thing I dislike the most about Rust is the fact that lifetimes are so often automatically elided and invisible; so much so that when you actually must set them explicitly it’s a struggle at times because it happe...
First seen: 2026-03-23 05:59
Last seen: 2026-03-24 00:13