Doing a research work in robotic domain using Pharo as a prototype and implementation tool (via PhaROS) is a whole new experience. It is quite impressive to see how quick an implementation idea becomes a working prototype/solution in Pharo thanks to its productive development environment. Most of my robotic applications are critical tasks which require real-time performance, some of them are heavily resource-demanding (CPU). Due to the single process nature of Pharo, running these tasks on the same VM results in a performance bottleneck, thus sometime, violate the real-time requirement of the application. Common solution to this problem is to dispatch these tasks to several native system processes to boost the performance. Unfortunately, this feature is not supported in current Pharo.

Read how Sang did address this issue.