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I blame Stroustrup, who likes to throw "systems programming" or "system language" into every discussion about his baby. It is a bad meme, it even doesn't fit f

• kps 12y ago
  I wouldn't blame Stroustroup. “Systems programming” is vague because originally “systems software” was what came with your system — ranging from OS drivers (which you could write today only in a very carefully restricted subset of C++, amounting to “C with classes”), up to compilers, which can be expressed more cleanly using the larger generally-regarded-as-sane subset (e.g. STL, RAII) of C++. I think Go fits decently for the latter, and reaches up to higher-level (or lazier) code that others might write in Python or Ruby or Haskell. Rust seems to reach as far down as C, which would be nice, though I worry that LLVM lacks any target smaller than ARM to keep them honest.
• pohl 12y ago
  The concept of "systems language" itself is not the meme to which I referred. Rather, the bad meme is the notion that Go is one. It may be some day if they make GC optional, but it isn't in its current form.
• pjmlp 12y ago
  Why blame him? This is a correct definition. A language capable of building the OS whole stack from the ground up, taken out the obvious parts in Assembly. Yes, there are OS out there written in C++.