Surprised anyone hasn't brought up this exciting new language on CBoard yet!
The Rust Programming Language
While it is still very much at the pre-alpha stage, it is being hyped as the new C replacement all across the tubes.
Someone has already started work on porting the GNU coreutils to Rust:
https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
...under the MIT license no less
Functional goodies like pattern matching, algebraic data types combined with guaranteed memory safety and a sensible ABI. What's not to like?