I believe that the release of more information about the C/C++ libraries for 2009 is imminent - Brad Miller and the team at WPI are doing the development and Brad himself is starting next weekend to do some public talks and demos of the approach: see
this post. I'm sure it won't be long before the information from these talks makes it onto CD.
If you are curious about the approach being taken by the WPI team, I would think their previous work on WPILib might be indicitive of the approach we may see for this year's libraries. Check out the original WPILib
here.
Please note that I have no insight into the actual work at WPI, and that this is all speculation on my part. But the WPILib approach has been very successful for many teams in the past (including, whether they knew it or not, everyone who used EasyC), so I see no reason why Brad and the team would make a radical departure now. And now with open source and the ability of the FIRST community to fully participate in the development and maintenance of the libraries, I personally think it will be even better!