Apologies for re-opening this thread, but I do enjoy these somewhat speculative discussions!
The reason being that I have recently heard about another language - Crystal - which claims to create code as fast as “C” but is as easy to use as Ruby. A recent review of it is here and implies it is suitable for low-level systems programming “such as daemons and obtuse Kernels”. I wonder what - if any - benefits it might bring to Haiku?
“D” certainly seems to be the most popular contender amongst this forum, should it be necessary to have a “drop-in” replacement to C++. There was a bit of discussion on the relative merits of “D” in this thread.