See, I'm coming from the understanding that language development is a dead-end in the real world. Can you name a single language made after Zig or Rust? And even those languages haven't taken over much of the professional world. So when I say companies will maintain compilers, I mean DSLs (like starlark or RSpec), application-specific languages (like CUDA), variations on existing languages (maybe C++ with some in-house rules baked in), and customer-facing config languages for advanced systems and SaaS applications.
Yes, several, e.g., Gleam, Mojo, Hare, Carbon, C3, Koka, Jai, Kotlin, Reason ... and r/ProgrammingLanguages is chock full of people working on new languages that might or might not ever become more widely known ... it takes years and a lot of resources and commitment. Zig and Rust are well known because they've been through the gauntlet and are well marketed ... there are other languages in productive use that haven't fared well that way, e.g., D and Nim (the best of the bunch and highly underappreciated), Odin, V, ...
> even those languages haven't taken over much of the professional world.
Non sequitur goalpost moving ... this has nothing to do with whether language development is a dead-end "in the real world", which is a circular argument when we're talking about language development. The claim is simply false.
Bad take. People said the same about c/c++ and now rust and zig are considered potential rivals. The ramp up is slow and there's never going to be a moment of viral adoption the way we're used to with SaaS, but change takes place.
