Val, a high-level systems programming language
It seems to me the lack of references would prevent any use in contexts that are talking directly to the hardware (which is typically memory mapped). I’m thinking of microcontrollers or device drivers. You could presumably patch it over with unsafe, but in those contexts that would be the majority of the code, which defeats the purpose imo. I guess they are targeting a different market, but that seems like a big downside for a systems programming language.