the leading thesis idea is a reimplementation of Emerald process migration. I feel its an underutilitized idea. if I could come to understand it well, it could be added to an existing language. Being exposed to a lot of ruby lately, the next ruby virtual machine is a possible candidate to work with. Open source VMs natually lead one to parrot. I was reminded by reading the parrot faq that one major benefit of moving the popular open source scripting languages to a common VM is that languages can use the libraries of other langauges. There is a lot of great code in the perl CPAN and to be able to access that from ruby would be great.