Vala could be a contender on the "system languages" list -- it's runtime is just GLib, which has already been ported to all sorts of platforms and optimized qui

Vala could be a contender on the "system languages" list -- it's runtime is just GLib, which has already been ported to all sorts of platforms and optimized quite well, and Vala is quite a nice language in and of itself. http://live.gnome.org/Vala http://live.gnome.org/Vala Also, I don't think he gives the game-oriented scripting languages quite enough credit. They're not as mature as Lua, but almost all of them seem like more likely competitors with Lua than Stackless Python or Io, much less Tcl or Javascript (all of which except V8 are slower than Lua, and when Lua's performance is already an issue that's not encouraging) -- most of the game-oriented languages solve one of the biggest Lua gripes quite handily, which is that Lua's exclusive use of floating-point arithmetic makes it a pain (okay this is hearsay) on ARM-based platforms without floating point units (which is most of them). The good news is that LuaJIT now has a port to powerpc along with the mainstream i386 and amd64 ports, and to my knowledge an arm port of the interpreter is in the works as well.