Drivers are usually written in C for historical reasons, this can be bad if you want your driver to be safe and secure. We show that it is possible to write low-level drivers for PCIe devices in modern high-level languages.
We are working on super-fast user space network drivers for the Intel 82599ES (ixgbe) 10 Gbit/s NICs in different high-level languages. We've got fully working implementations in Rust, C#, go, OCaml, Haskell, and Swift. All of them are written from scratch and require no kernel code.
Check out our GitHub page with links to all implementations, performance measurements, and publications for further reading.