Re: to serialize/deserialize closures; and multithreading

[rm]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 10:38:00PM -0000, Faraz Shahbazker wrote:
> nick,
> 
> I am curious too : what is your purpose of migration?
> 
>         I am working on something similar, for using scheme on
> Beowulf-clusters with PVM. Here the purpose of migration is to
> remotely-evaluate a sexp. But possible uses of this technology
> could be to simply suspend/restart programs(see chpox), or for

Just out of _my_ curiosity: are you aware of 'kali' -- a reborn
MIT scheme that supports distributed computing?
For yet  another 'transport' layer for S-Expresive Data have 
a look at FramerD (former MIT project, now at sourceforge,
<http://www.framerd.org> -- erm, some basic Guile bindings for
that can be found at http://cvs.zeit.de (beware: highly experimental
code with bitrot!).
> 
> > Should a mutation on the new computer of a captured variable
> > affect the old computer? - greg
> 
>         Basically, if your program is purely/mostly functional,
> it might be easy to migrate, while maintaining referential
> transparency - just byte-copy(with tags) all   data-types.
> The semantics of mutable objects (when mutation does occur)
> is for you to decide. It might make greater sense for example
> for exceptions to be migrated and  handled remotely, than
> say mutexes or ports.

Autsch, that does get rather expensive when closures/continuation
are used (something that does happen occasionally in functional
programming ;-).


just my 0.02$, 

 Ralf Mattes