[BruceIV]

The initial implementation was finished in '03, and we revived the project somewhere around '15, so your guess about a research project that was recently taken back up is correct.

We intend to write a "proper compiler" at some point (probably either a Clang fork or a Cforall front-end on LLVM), but it hasn't been a priority for our limited engineering staff yet. I think we are getting a summer student to work on our debugging story (at least in GDB -- setting it up so it knows how to talk to our threading runtime and demangle our names), and improving our debugging capabilities has been a major focus of our pre-beta-release push.