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You beat me to it. My first reaction was "Wait - how is preserving Erlang's syntax but losing the VM a good thing?". I'd love projects going the other direction - a more modern syntax built on Erlang's rock-solid VM + OTP libraries.

What are the names of some of those projects?

Reia http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language

Lisp Flavored Erlang http://github.com/rvirding/lfe

I don't see a problem with process isolation ... you can control the bytecode generated from the compiler, and then you make the Java FFI really hard to please.

Since Erlang uses light-weight processes, this is exactly what the Erlang VM is doing.

I'm always skeptic if there is only one actively maintained implementation of a language in use. In this respect, this is per se a good thing.