It has become increasingly clear to me that C's influence on the systems landscape is even stronger than it would initially appear. Our ability to move beyond what we have now is not merely hampered by the fact that we have to create an entire systems infrastructure, it is hampered by the fact that we always get sucked into having to support C shared libraries in addition to that, and in general that requires certain things to be true of your language, which pulls you into the C local optima. And now you've failed to write a systems language that has moved fundamentally beyond C.

In short, to be able to run a C library means that you language must hand over total control to that C library, who may then dance all over memory, if it chooses. You can't build a system that enforces any further constraints. And you don't have to be an "academic weirdo" language anymore to want to be able to enforce constraints; even something like Go has a significant runtime that you need to work with properly to get the benefits of go, and a C library simply expects to own its thread for as long as it wants, do whatever it wants to allocate memory, use whatever resources it wants, not be scheduled in any way by anything other than the OS, and just this immense laundry list of requirements that all looked OK 30 years ago, but it's increasingly clear that to get to the next step of systems design, some of those are going to have to be modified. And C is not the language that will allow this.

The only language I know that manages to have radically different semantics that C at the deepest levels, yet can still talk to C libraries without (much) compromise of those semantics, is Haskell.

Somehow we've got to escape from C-type linking dictating requirements to the deepest levels of the semantics of the new language, or we're not going to escape from the local optima we are in right now.