Some more ideas in this vein (on the implementation side, at least): Running the language runtime directly on top of Xen (http://nymote.org/software/mirage/ ht

Some more ideas in this vein (on the implementation side, at least): Running the language runtime directly on top of Xen (http://nymote.org/software/mirage/ http://nymote.org/software/mirage/, http://corp.galois.com/halvm http://corp.galois.com/halvm, http://erlangonxen.org/ http://erlangonxen.org/ etc) Replacing OS memory protection with a memory-safe VM (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605687) Using hardware virtualisation to reduce the costs of OS protection between processes (http://arrakis.cs.washington.edu/ http://arrakis.cs.washington.edu/) While second is only speculative, Mirage has already demonstrated some fairly respectable performance improvements by simplifying virtual memory management.