Arduino Emulator, part 2

In my last post I introduced the Arduino emulator that I wrote for CS-11M. The source code is here:

https://github.com/mike-matera/ArduinoGrader

The emulator was designed for grading and has limitations. The emulator code and the sketch run in one thread so if the sketch goes into an infinite loop the emulator hangs (unless the loop calls into Arduino code which calls the emulator). Sketches often use static initialization (see the Servo library examples) which makes emulator initialization fragile. Most of all it's tedious writing test code in C++.

Before next year I want to rewrite the emulator to make it more flexible and complete. Here are my goals for the next implementation:

1. Write tests in Python. 
2. Serial port interaction using Pexpect.
3. Loadable sketches. Sketches should be loadable at run-time, rather than linked in. Loading a sketch with dlopen() let's me ensure the emulator is initialized before static initialization in the sketch. 
4. Threading support. It will be necessary for attachInterrupt().
5. Arduino IDE integration. It would be ideal to have the IDE compile the sketch for the emulator. That way I can integrate the emulator back-end in the same way that different chips and architectures are integrated. 

There's a significant leap in complexity. The emulator will be two processes, the C++ sketch and the Python script, communicating via a socket (and Google's protocol buffers). The emulator state that's now embodied in the Emulator class should be Python side and socket calls from the sketch should be synchronous so test code can be as precise as possible. 

But when will I have the time to build it?