The Vault Programming Language - at Microsoft Research. This is a variant of C with static type- and semantic-checking built-in. The goal is to get the runtime efficiency and flexibility of C, but with security and robustness guaranteed (or at least assisted) by the compiler. I hope that something useful and non-proprietary comes out of this.
Unfortunately, syntactically Vault is explicitly attribute/predicate based, and looks like an odd cross between Perl and C#. For example, here's what the interface declaration for the write() function looks like:
You can get used to anything, I guess, but if MS is going to the trouble to make a safe C, I think they would do well to make the effort to do it with a syntax that doesn't look bolted on. Oh, and just a nit: why is write() declared void rather than, say, int???
But these are just minor issues. Vault has some really cool features:
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