Rust has the most potential at being a true successor to C++. But it's not very usable at the moment (it suffers from far too much change within the language and standard libraries), and it will still take a lot of work before it is a production-grade language.
Author of blog post here: Interesting that you say that. I came really close to saying in the blog post that Rust could be the alternative to C++ that I am looking for. But then I decided that I know way too little about Rust at this point to make that statement.
The one thing with Rust is that it seems to me to also offer so much fine control on memory ownership that it would start to develop its own set of "gotcha"s.
With that said I'm looking forward to seeing progress on the language as I think we've been needing a systems programming language where you can express ownership semantics as part of the language itself, and have the compiler check those for you.
D seems like a pretty good candidate as well (and even has some development effort from Alexei Alexandrescu, who has authored many good C++ programming volumes).
