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Comment by iainmerrick | Hacker News Reader

That earlier comment didn’t actually mention “systems” at all (although it does include “low-level”).

I feel like “systems programming” is getting increasingly ill-defined these days, anyway. If Kotlin and Java aren’t allowed, how about Go? Are you ruling out all languages with garbage collection?

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A basic litmus test I use for systems programming languages is: “can I imagine the Linux kernel including this language one day?”

Currently that’s C, Rust, and some assembly.. obviously there are more languages used for systems programming tasks too. Memory management, concurrency, and low-level access are also super important in a system language. How would you define a systems language?

C++ is sobbing in a corner I guess

C++ would sob in a corner, but the Sob static object was instantiated before the Tears static object because the link order changed and so there's a dangling reference and nothing runs any more.

Well deserved upvote.

I think systems programming, like system tools or cli tool for example can also be done with a garbage collector e.g. in Go or Ocaml. For low-level development you would usually expect that the program manages memory itself, not some garbage collector. This is not black and white, some approaches of reference counting for example might be suitable for some low-level development. Or in some languages you can choose like Nim, D or if I understand correctly, now in Swift ?

> That earlier comment didn’t actually mention “systems” at all

It doesn't really need to mention "systems" specifically, since the comparison to other common systems languages, in addition to the words "low-level" implicitly imply systems programming languages.

Usually, languages with GC will not be considered contenders for systems programming.

You're right to note systems programming doesn't involve GC usually

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