"massive amounts of tooling necessary to fulfill the promise of ZeroVM" For sure. To me it seems like a good environment for isolating processes and users in s

"massive amounts of tooling necessary to fulfill the promise of ZeroVM" For sure. To me it seems like a good environment for isolating processes and users in security and execution contexts -- just boot up an instance, perform a task and then destroy. How it applies to data processing is not very clear. "But the specific product is of interest to me, not just the environment that spawned it." I see what you mean. I feel that anyone creating such a product/environment will run into massive problems that are very non-technical. How do you get language owners/implementers to agree to a common standard especially in today's web where we see common denominators of data sharing like RSS slowly being strangled by the big players -- let alone co-operations in programming environments/runtimes. The reason I mention the "big players" is that without somebody getting funded to think about this in a serious manner for an extended period of time, it will be very hard. Organisations like universities have the brainpower for this but not the money or the drive. Something encouraging here is the recent slew of JVM languages -- they share objects with Java. Limitation here is its all on a single platform. Maybe with the recent announcement of a Haskell kernel for IPython environment there is room for doing some inter-lang op work?