Right now the language I see as most positioned for serious work is the Mozilla Rust language. There have been a few stabs at a type-safe deterministic language

Right now the language I see as most positioned for serious work is the Mozilla Rust language. There have been a few stabs at a type-safe deterministic language- BitC and SystemC come to mind. Loosely, you're looking for a language where you can ensure that garbage collection won't happen and that assembly can be written. Those languages aren't popular these days. Then what's needed is some level of type safety and guarantees about efficient code generation. You should be able to reason quite well about the generated code. "No Magic" is the watchword of that land. Rust is targeting the next level up from kernels, i.e., system utilities and performant applications. It's not really intended to write kernels, but I think it can get there with some careful work. It should, IMO, do reasonably well on more powerful embedded systems based around typical OS models, e.g., the RasPI.