I might actually be more excited about Val as a C++ successor than I am about Herb Sutter's excellent CppFront... Admittedly, all I know about it is from the two presentations below. But, from what I can tell...
Statically compiled. Statically typed. Interops with C++. Memory safe. Typesafe. Data-race-free.
The elevator pitch I give when describing it goes like this: Imagine you were starting a new C++ project and didn't really care about performance (spoiler: perf comes back in the end). So, you decide to not bother using pointers or references anywhere. You just pass by value, return by value everywhere, all day long. If you ignored the obvious perf problems of passing around maps of vectors of objects by value, wouldn't it be nice? you don't have to worry about side effects or data races or anything. And yet, the data is not immutable. You can go ahead and mutate it all you want worry-free because the data is all completely local to your function.
Well, turns out the Val folks have figured out that by eliminating pointers and references from the language, the can get the compiler to automatically pass-by-const-reference and return-value-optimization under the hood such that it preserves both the performance and the semantics that you want at the same time.
Val: A Safe Language to Interoperate with C++ - Dimitri Racordon - CppCon 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws-Z8xKbP4w
> Interops with C++
Doubt. I simply don't believe any other language out there is capable of interoperating with C++. Even C++ compilers have broken binary compatibility, different versions of the same compiler even.