Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
The Go talk 2009 pdf has a comment to explain why they came up with the go language :
No new major systems language in a decade.
What’s the meaning of systems language?
I can see C#/Java is `not’ a systems language, and C/C++ is.
It’s a rough, informal distinction, but the idea is that there are “application programming languages,” targeted at programmers who develop shrinkwrapped business applications, and “systems programming languages,” targeted at programmers who program tools for other programmers (compilers, etc.) and low-level software such as OS kernels, device drivers, etc.
In short, most (recently-invented, anyway) languages are designed to make it easier to develop user-facing software for dealing with some non-computing domain—finance, engineering, etc. Systems programming languages are those, such as C, FORTH, Go, etc. which are intended or at least suitable for programming in the domain of computing.
These often, but do not always, feature compilation to native code, loose type systems which permit extensive “punning,” and unmanaged memory access through pointers or an equivalent construct.