I initially looked at languages like clojure, but the slow load times of the JVM put me off. Now that you mentioned gcj, I found this note from Rich Hickey: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/58e3f8e5dfb876c9 which makes it sound like one could compile clojure => java => native binaries.
The load times are an issue, check out nailgun, -Xbootclasspath , java -client, javaRebel. There's a few other tricks i've seen mentioned, anybody else?
http://blog.headius.com/2009/01/my-favorite-hotspot-jvm-flag...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1316056/how-to-reduce-sca...
http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/33f...
http://groups.google.com/group/leiningen/browse_thread/threa...