wild and crazy idea?

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

Hello,

Reading about Felix' fthreads I got this Wild And Crazy (tm) idea. After 
giving it some thought, it can't really be new (but if it is, I hereby claim 
full worldwide rights ;-) so if anyone has any pointer to further reading, 
I'll appreciate the feedback.

The main question is one that nobody on this list should fail to answer 
right: what is the main thing that makes Erlang special?

Of course, it is the stuff that earned Dr. Joe his title (so to speak): the 
lightweight & isolated processes framework and the monitoring and 
distribution mechanisms. For the purpose of this discussion, I claim that 
the rest is just syntactic sugar.

Now to my idea:
*    would it be possible to separate these most important features from the 
actual language implementation?
*    is it possible to create such a generic framework, where one could plug 
in different virtual machines to execute the actual code, and offer all of 
them the same services that today only the beam vm enjoys?

Is anything like this already out there? Well, some parts of it are, like 
PVM or MPI, but those have a different niche to fill and don't cover all the 
ground (or so I gather, at least, please set me straight if I'm wrong)

What do you think?
best regards,
Vlad