Re: continuations over the network

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <address@hidden>]

Francois-Rene Rideau wrote:

> IIRC, Kali considered all nodes as part of a same uniform pool of
> processors, and would do its own background load-balancing of
> processes. The user-visible migration primitive would advise the
> system to move a few stack frames worth of computation to the
> destination processor, with no guarantee as to where any specific
> computation would actually take place.

Kali does not do any automatic load-balancing.  You specify which
address space ("aspace") you want a computation to migrate to, and
that's where it goes and stays.  Indeed, user-level load-balancing is
one of the system's stated design goals: since you have a powerful
language and the ability to migrate continuations, you can construct
your own library of balancing primitives suited to your task.  I have
constructed such libraries (for some distributed algorithms); the
language is tremendously beautiful for this purpose.  (Overall, Kali
is easily one of the most fun programming systems I've ever used.)

Your somewhat fanciful impression of Kali suggests you may be
confusing it for some other system.

Shriram