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I don't really know much about D, but OCaml nowadays has loads of libraries, excellent features like macros, type safety everywhere, pattern matching, a super-powerful object system (not used very much, mind you), functors, and it compiles down to fast, tight machine code. If you use Debian or Fedora you can just 'apt-get' or 'yum install' the whole system and almost all of the popular libraries.

Rich.

You may want to check out OCaml. You can use C++ libraries from it using something like SWIG (and the libraries of other languages too, using something like Pycaml for Python, and there's an interface for Perl too).

Here's a nice comparisong of a ray tracer written in C++ and one written in Ocaml.

And here are many more comparisons and information on why OCaml is so great. :)

Oh, by the way, OCaml is much safer than C++, infinitely more elegant, faster to develop in and more readable.

Rich.

That would be OCaml then. It compiles to native executables which require no outside support, and it's relatively easy to integrate with C code.

Rich.

Automatic buffer overflow protection only covers the straightforward buffer overflow problems, i.e. array index overflows. In the case of more complex pointer arithmetic, where most of these problems occur, automatic protection is not possible (at least not without losing the option of pointer arithmetic).

Actually, automatic checking is very much possible, and has been for years. For example, Bounds checking gcc (that website is down right now, so try my page on the subject). That was written in 1994, and there are newer systems available now which don't have such a serious performance penalty.

The real solution is to stop writing critical code in C. Other languages provide bounds checking, and are faster and safer than C: for example OCaml which I prefer nowadays.

Rich.

(and also!) If you're a business using Objective CAML, find other businesses and people using it here.