gluon

Totally agree. The thing with LuaJIT or more appropriately stock Lua is that the VM is small enough to include in your project directly. If Vec and String were exposed to Lua first class construct, we would be a long way there. The two most mature, well-designed languages in the Rust world are Gluon [1] and Dyon [2] I believe there is a _great_ opportunity for something like Terra [3] but woven into Rust. Perhaps with the same type of compiler plugin that enabled HolyJIT [4] The grail is having both a GC and an ownership based gc-free lower level all in the same language. Start dynamic, harden to static and sprinkle in properties. As a side note, I have been thinking about how to bolt ownership onto a dynamic language and then I learned about Snowflake [5]. I think it would be totally doable to bolt ownership onto Java using annotations

There's also the Gluon language [1] and, as someone below mentioned, this [2] enterprise mobile thing. [1]: https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon [2]: http://gluonhq.com/