Over the past few days I have been looking into Faust, a functional programming language for sound synthesis and audio processing created at the GRAME-CNCM Research Department.
Specifically, I am checking out the various built-in reverb modules. They are straight forward to compile as JSFX plugins for Reaper, allowing rapid prototyping. It also seems doable to compile into VST plugins using JUCE.
Looking at the source code for the reverb modules, they appear themselves to be programmed in Faust. As such they should be quite hackable.