RE: Preemption, Persistence, and Mobility

["Anton van Straaten" <address@hidden>]

Dave Long wrote:
> Why the aversion to manual labor?
> Often, an application is better
> informed than its runtime system
> about what part of its state is
> essential. [3]

Similar questions and arguments are raised in connection with the need for
garbage collection.  In both cases, the answers are simple: developer
productivity, improved reliability (less manual labor, fewer bugs), better
separation of concerns, etc...

On a more fundamental level, much of human civilization is based on an
aversion to manual labor, so there must be *some* logic there... :)

Regarding Peter Wasilko's earlier question:
> >    Has anyone made continuations persistent, so a language user
> > could *transparently* freeze a thread and thaw it during a subsequent
> > execution run without having to manually tear it down to save its
> > state out to disk and then read its state back in to rebuild it
> > from scratch?

One implementation that may be of interest is Kali Scheme:
http://www.neci.nec.com/PLS/Kali.html,
"a distributed implementation of Scheme that permits efficient transmission
of higher-order objects such as closures and continuations".

Anton