I think that's an excellent idea too. Boehm doesn't seem to be very good with threads. And green threads make things like the use of extended threading à la Erlang much easier. IO would probably be a problem, but that's something that can be defered.
Yes, true. It would also be a pretty simple solution IMO, although potentially fraught with some dangers, especially when checking dead threads.
In any case I'm currently thinking of adding a library, where if a global variable is not read (only assigned to), it is simply removed.
Basically: extract the set of global variables that are read, and the set that are written to. If both sets are not equal, eliminate all set operations on members of the written set that are not members of the read set (replace them with their (car ast!subx)). Then eliminate any hanging constants: naked fn definitions and other constants that are in sequences not in the tail position. Repeat until set of global variables that are written is a full subset of the set of global variables that are read, and if they're not equal, raise an unbound variable error (i.e. a global is read but never assigned to, which as you mentioned would segfault. Not perfect of course, because reading the global before it is assigned to will still crash, but better than nothing).
