So some folk at Google
invented a language, called Go (debugger called Ogle is forthcoming). Early, experimental languages with no way to target Windows are a dime a dozen, but this one's got enough of a pedigree behind it that it's attracting some interest. Just looking over the docs, it seems interesting.
It's aimed at systems development. A C substitute, like. Emphasis on performance and compiles to native code, but without pointer arithmetic or manual memory management. Type system is pretty interesting: rather than true polymorphism, it's got something like implicit interface inheritance (you could liken it to a static version of Python's duck typing) plus some syntactic sugar that simulates subclassing. Syntax is nothing to write home about; on the one hand it's designed to make it easier to use functions like the first-class objects they are, but on the other hand sometimes semicolons are whitespace and sometimes they're not.
Main draw seems to be the concurrency model, which is different enough from the standard ways of doing things that they invented a new word for 'em, "goroutines." Under the hood they're a lot cheaper than native threads, apparently. The central concept for them is to avoid sharing memory (which, I suppose, is still
technically possible if you are indiscreet with where you send pointers) through the use of things called "channels." Stick data in 'em in one thread, suck it out in another. Having first-class support for the things is the main draw.
They've clearly got server-side web development in mind for this thing, if you look at what parts of the standard library are biggest and fanciest. It can't, as yet, link or be linked to any other language, but it does have a foreign function interface if you want to call something from a C library. There's also an incomplete package in the standard library that looks like they'll be making an interactive parser for it. And another one that looks like
Spacewar! will come as a standard feature eventually.
All in all it looks very modern, and by reports stable enough to get some useful things working right now, if you don't mind that the only libraries not built into the language are C libraries invoked through the foreign function interface. People are already hard at work trying to extend the standard library, though. It's young enough that patches will probably be accepted quickly.