Comment by brabel

> It’s not always clear what is meant by “system programming”. I’ve begun writing utility scripts in Julia; it’s practical now because the startup time is vastly improved. These can be run like bash scripts, with a shebang line that invokes Julia with the desired environment (using the --project flag).

I think it is clear enough. The language must have a small or non-existing runtime so it is practical to write systems that do not ship the same fat runtime on every binary. The language must support compiling to binaries, otherwise it really cannot be used by itself for systems. It must provide access to the available Operating System API directly without the need for bindings (to the extent possible, as some OSs only expose the C API;ABI).

What is a system, you may ask. I think you can define that as anything that can run by itself (no runtime) and perform any "low level" operation permitted by the OS.