I wouldn't blame Stroustroup. “Systems programming” is vague because originally “systems software” was what came with your system — ranging from OS drivers (whi

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.