Comment by Jtsummers
2 days ago
> I'm not aware of any language that lets you serialize a whole call stack.
That's basically what continuations provide. Scheme, SML, and others provide them.
2 days ago
> I'm not aware of any language that lets you serialize a whole call stack.
That's basically what continuations provide. Scheme, SML, and others provide them.
Continuations allow an inactive call stack to sit around in memory. But do any of those languages let you save a continuation to a file and resume it in a different execution of the program, without massive contortions to the code? That's what I mean by serialization.
Seems potentially interesting to explore what would be required to store durable continuations. Feels very related to incrementalization and provenance, as you can see materializing a continuation to disk (whatever storage backend) requiring dependence tracking to do anything other than simply snapshotting the whole program state. I am just spitballing though, not sure if anyone has actually tried this.