You may want to take a look at Erlang before getting started on the project. Erlang is a functional programming language that already addresses fault-tolerance, modularity, distributed computing, and other problems you may need to solve. Even if you don't end up using Erlang, you could probably pick up some good design ideas from the (excellent) documentation.
Erlang does provide several mechanisms for interfacing with C code. If you wanted you could use Erlang at a system level, and C++ at a lower level where performance and interoperability with existing code is important.
Slashdot Mirror
You may want to take a look at Erlang before getting started on the project. Erlang is a functional programming language that already addresses fault-tolerance, modularity, distributed computing, and other problems you may need to solve. Even if you don't end up using Erlang, you could probably pick up some good design ideas from the (excellent) documentation.
Erlang does provide several mechanisms for interfacing with C code. If you wanted you could use Erlang at a system level, and C++ at a lower level where performance and interoperability with existing code is important.