Re: Y Store /Closures

[Jacob Matthews <address@hidden>]

On Sat, 1 Mar 2003, Daniel Weinreb wrote:

> This can be hard for a lot of reasons since various kinds of state are
> hard to marshall, e.g. if they depend on various kinds of runtime
> context like already-open streams and so on.

Agreed. In fact, you could say that the whole problem in some sense is
that various kinds of state are hard to marshall. We've discovered in the
course of scaling the cgi-compiler of "Restructuring" to the full PLT
Scheme language that in practical terms, space-efficient marshalling of
arbitrary PLT Scheme continuations is almost the entirety of the work in
implementing "Restructuring"'s idea for the full language
(time-efficiency, at least compiled-program runtime efficiency, hasn't
been a problem for us so far). We believe we can do far better than the
equivalent of saving a process-image per continuation and we have concrete
ideas about how to do it; as soon as we have a chance to develop them into
a working system we'll let people know.

-jacob