Tbh, I have never heard of Pike or societyserver before, will check those out!
As for smalltalk, I am also not intimately familiar with the language, but what I have in mind is somewhat lower level, with emphasis on C-like struct layouts stored in a POD way (so raw structs inside arrays and the like).
I'd say a key difference is in my language (working name Dream (because I started the project as my 'dream' language, and picking names is hard)), is that these isolation contexts are explicit, and you pointers can't really cross them.
There are special 'far' pointers that do have the ability to reference external objects in different context, but there's an explicit unwrap operation that needs to happen that can fail, as that object is not guaranteed to be reachable for whatever reason. Processes can be explicitly deleted, meaning all reference operations to them will fail.
To be clear, when i say process, i mean my lightweight internal isolation thing.
So in summary, my langage is procedural inside processes, with in-process garbage-collection, C-like performance and explicit method calls. Between processes, you either have smalltalk-like signals, or you can do Rust-style borrows, where you can access objects inside the process for the duration of a method call.
It has erlang-like 'just let it crash' philosophy, but again is a C-like procedural language (or shall I say Go-like, since it has total memory safety and GC).
It also has familiar C-like syntax, and quite a small(ish) feature set outside of the core stuff.
I have a huge doc written up on it, no idea if it would work and if it did, it would be useful, but I do have some tentative confidence in it.
(Also no claims on being original or inventive.)
I have never heard of Pike or societyserver before
pike/roxen had a brief window of growth in the 90s but the leaders at the roxen company (not the devs) missed the opportunity to work with the FOSS community.
pike is fully C-syntax, and it is very performant, so that may be interesting for you.
societyserver is my fork/continuation of a university project called open-sTeam that stopped development more than a decade ago. i continue to use it and when i am not busy earning money try to work on it, but i haven't yet been able to build a community around it.
the process isolation you talk about sounds like something that erlang promises as well, but i don't know enough about erlang to tell. i'd be curious to learn more though.
open-sTeam/societyserver built an object-level access control system. method calls on others object are being intercepted and only allowed to pass if the caller has the necessary permission to access that object.
it's not process isolation, but also a concept i find interesting