Simple question. What is the latest research into doing the sort of tasks usually done in C/C++ with something else? I'll list three areas I think are important.

1) Ability to interface directly with hardware (i.e. can you write an OS in it)

2) Ability to create compiled binaries and both static and shared libraries

3) Modern features like garbage collection that don't slow the whole thing down to a crawl

I'm aware of OCaml, which seems to fulfill at least #2 and #3 and I know about the House project in Haskell. The latter seems not to have been worked on in about 2 years though. I also know about the D language which seems like a better C++ but not a real departure from what's been going on for 30+ years. More generally, is any significant research into radical new OS concepts going on and what sort of languages are they using?