Algol 68: The ambitious systems language that never beat C

Standardized in 1968 by IFIP, it was a successor to Algol 60 with a much richer type system, orthogonal design, and features you still see in modern languages: user-defined types, flexible arrays, structured control flow, and even built-in concurrency primitives in some implementations. It could do low-level systems work too direct memory access, pointer arithmetic, bitwise operations but with stricter type checking and, in some compilers, bounds checking.

There were serious attempts to use it for real systems: the FLACC compiler on IBM mainframes, Algol 68R on the ICL 1900 series, and even experiments with OS kernels at universities. Benchmarks from the time sometimes matched or exceeded C on the same hardware.

So why did it fade? The language report was infamously dense (“an intellectual disaster” according to Dijkstra), early compilers were slow and incomplete, and by the mid-70s Unix and C had huge momentum. Algol 68 never got the tooling, libraries, or marketing push that C enjoyed.

Looking at it now, a lot of what Rust and Zig are praised for strict typing, memory safety options, clean syntax for parallelism was already in Algol 68 more than 50 years ago. It just didn’t win the popularity contest.