C, for the level of abstraction it targets is an extremely good language, and this is the reason why it is still alive, and why a lot of big successful projects are written using C. The problem is its standard library. The "get this new language" teams should instead focus on how to incrementally improve C. D was a (bad IMHO) attempt, just retry and make it better, a step after the other. If we will wait the ANSI committee we can all get old with strcpy().

IMHO one of the few things that should be addressed at language level is that structures with function pointer members should have a way to be called with the implicit structure pointer (something like "this") as argument. That's all we need from OOP for C. This makes you able to do:

    list *mylist = createList();
    mylist->push(foo);
    mylist->pop();

That's what currently you do like:

    mylist->ops->push(mylist,foo);