Greetings!
Are there any efforts being made to make the VM parallel (or as you might say, concurrent)? It seems like that's the future of programming models, and seeing as ChucK is hardly a lightweight in computing resources.... or is garbage collection a higher priority for the dev team?
We are certainly interested in taking advantage of many-core CPU's, but no current effort is yet being made. I think this challenge is there for many, if not most, systems today. Perhaps new low-level programming paradigms (e.g., for imperative languages at the C/C++/assembler level) have to be deployed before these systems can truly be parallelized. For example, Apple's next OS X release, "Snow Leopard", will apparently offer concurrent language primitives ("blocks") which the kernel can then efficiently farm out to cores - additionally the OS abstracts the number of actual cores so programmers don't always need to take this into account. Not sure yet how well things like this will work in practice, but this seems like a start. In short, it's hard problem, and I think for many systems, it may need to be addressed in the form of new language primitives + OS support. Ge!