(And yes, I know it's actually here already). Now that clock-speed rises have stalled, basically forever, desktop and laptop PCs are growing ever-increasing numbers of cores in their CPU chips,
Is there design and conceptualisations work going on to see how Pharo will deal with providing increased access to the additional processing power? One thing I have been thinking about is a set of co-operating Pharo VMs. But given memory and storage are shared, this may not provide as large a benefit as we'd like. Or moving Pharo into being having multiple native-threads, and taking Pharo into a concurrency route. Or - whatever it is I am too ignorant to see. This all strikes me (like the way Smalltalk is extending its system boundary out onto the web with Monticello, Pharo is extending that via the Configuration Browser and Versionner) as a way Pharo could build on Smalltalk, while becoming its own thing. (as opposed to being a Smalltalk with a very big set of classes). Is there thought work going on in this area yet? DabbleDB had a system of running multiple VMs on a server, and hot-swapping them in and out depending on their CPU loading. Did that ever get developed intop a more generally-useful facility?
