Hei,
Thanks Jonathon for the very positive feedback again.
From all that you write, I think PiXC would best be served if it is extracted from XOSIG and set up as a new independent project. The project could start with PiXC 0.2 and freely re-develop it.
I would happily support you where I can, as a contributor, reviewer and antagonist, but the project would have a higher profile with you, Jonathon, as project owner. And with PiXC being developed, XOSIG could start to design a distributed OS and provide case studies for PiXC.
Your suggestion to develop the XC LLVM port is good. PiXC should be a version controlled branch from the main XC trunk (is it subversion you use?), so its base is kept current.
Added:On the point of LLVM license
http://llvm.org/docs/FAQ.html#license, availability of the source code for PiXC is to be made available at a well-known place, like xcore-exchange for example.
From your 5-pointed list it seems the KRoC team would be able to fulfil the project lifetime well, given funding. Do you think Peter Welch would be willing to take the strong lead? Or help to refine PiXC 0.2 into something we can take forwards?
With a bit of prior refinement, I do think the PiXC language and its implementation need to be steered by an independent Pi-semantics expert for several reasons. One of which is a desire to avoid something like the complex process-based semantics given to channels in Occam-pi (channel bundles and such), not meaning to take anything away from the quality work done on Occam-pi. From the Cambridge website, Robin Milner is semi-retired and more interested in bi-graphs these days, which do encompass Pi; but maybe Peter Sewell or Alan Mycroft could afford more interest in a Pi implementation. There is also David Walker at Oxford. But if none of these leading experts would be interested or available, we could try specialists such as Jon Kerridge at Napier who was once my external supervisor and a good mentor, and is well-published on WOTUG; or there is Matthew Hennessy at Sussex, or researchers at Edinburgh to try. Any thoughts?