Craig; and some of *those* (my own favorite is Squeak) can do music and garbage
collection at the same time without missing deadlines.
Ah, yes, Squeak! I remember that, and your "Quoth", the text-adventure livecoding system. Could I encourage you by saying I'm still very interested in that?
The thing that matters to me is the immediacy I get from dynamism. I don't ever want to have to stop the processes that make my music. ChucK comes close to that feeling, by making the edit/spork cycle very quick, but to propagate the effects of code changes I still have to kill shreds I would rather leave running during a performance. (Apologies if the situation has changed, I haven't actively used ChucK for my own work in several months. And apologies if I'm rehashing stuff everyone already knows. :)
No, that situation has remained basically the same. I agree with your perspective here; Whatever we decide to do (if anything) should make musical sense. The current temporary implementation of unchangeable public classes isn't very very powerful compared to some other languages -and that's a issue- but it also isn't very conductive to live performance and improvisation which I feel is another issue and one that should ideally be addressed by a solution to all of this. Yours, Kas.