Hello everybody,
Grubbas project to make a totally new compiler will of course solve this problem (along with many other, on top of being incredibly cool in just about every way). Unfortunately it still has a long way to go to be useful, though.
Why not creating a compiler that would generate .NET's CLR for that? To be honest I don't know exactly the technical implications of that but the description that some people made in this list of this for Pike code looks like a nice solution to me.
From what they said, it would provide a more stable and more easily maintained runtime with the advantage of being embeddable and compatible with .NET languages like Perl, Python, Cobol, Java,... and of course C# and VB.
/ David