Hi List,
In the past few week I have got slightly involved with one project that some of you might appreciate. I suppose that some of you Amy have heard of a recently developed Rust programming language by Mozilla foundation. It's primarily aims are to reduce safety critical errors at compiler level and provide simple abstractions to the programmer normally seen in higher level languages, such as Ruby and Python, yet being a systems language that may potentially be used for an OS implementation instead of aging suspects.
I do find Rust a pretty amazing language, and indeed, building on years of compiler practice, it has the real potential of becoming the next big affair of many embedded systems engineers. It doesn't, however, introduce a big overhead in code execution.
The particular project that I have spent some time with is titled Zinc. It aims to implement an RTOS-like system that is capable of running on bare-metal microcontroller chips. Please check it out and drop any feedback to myself or as a question on the mailing list.
http://zinc.rs http://rust-lang.org