I suspect that the advent of light-weight virtualisation and sandboxing (LXC, seccomp, NaCl) allows language implementors to provide the interesting properties

I suspect that the advent of light-weight virtualisation and sandboxing (LXC, seccomp, NaCl) allows language implementors to provide the interesting properties of Java — security and ease of deployment — without being barred from compilation to native code. That only applies to Rust and Go, Ceylon is a JVM language and D has been around since 2001; also Rust and Go are quite different languages, even in the memory department.