A distinguishing feature of Vale is: a) natively-compiled safe language b) that still has a sane syntax.

I remember seeing Vale many years ago (~10). Back then, it was something revolving around Gnome project, but now it still has a pre-prelease version 0.2-alpha. This means that the project's progress is relatively slow, but the language is very interesting to me.

Update: I confused Vale with Vala! Vale is the new project, Vala is 10+ years old, but they have an intersection of syntax, goals and ideas. That's why I was misled by seeing a similar name. Val-vale is almost the same!