[DennisP]

The EVM is just a virtual machine. People are working on languages with less opportunity for bugs than Solidity, like Flint: https://github.com/flintlang/flint

Also Vyper, which doesn't go as far but is already used in production: https://github.com/ethereum/vyper

The EVM itself isn't the end of the road either. Over the next couple years, Ethereum is migrating to a more scalable sharded version using proof of stake, and it looks like that will allow pluggable execution engines.