What are the best systems programming languages?

Rust systems programmer for over a year.

Compiles to efficient C code so you can run it anywhere, but still a nice and extendable syntax. The ability to do meta-programming can also shift a lot of computation to compile-time without having to create stand-alone scripts and put magic numbers in your code.

Looking at rust code will give you a headache, it is such a hard language to read. And this "memory safety" is also very hard, it is not free you have to work for it for so little gain, which means your development time will increase 5x easily.

Very portable. Together with C. These are the only programming languages that are officially supported in Android, iOS, and Windows. Also C++ is fast evolving, there are so many very good abstractions now in C++11/C++14/C++17 and next... C++20... Which will have compile time reflections and meta-classes!

Rapidly evolving, is getting more powerful and easier to use. Superior tooling. And very cross platform, it is found everywhere.