[R] checkpointing

[Richard O'Keefe]

I used to work on a Prolog implementation that did something similar.
At any point you could explicitly save a snapshot of the current state
and then from the operating system command line, resume it.
This wasn't really for checkpointing.  It was so that you could load
up a customised environment, initialise it, and then future runs would
be able to start up much quicker.

Initially it was all very simple.
(Hah!)  As long as you only expected a snapshot to work on the same kind
of machine with exactly the same operating system and libraries and the
same user files in the same (logical) places.

Then as operating systems added features, it got harder and harder.
First we had to cut back to discarding the stacks and restarting from
top level on resumption.
Finally, when address space layout randomisation came along (and by the
way, this was back in the 1980s) we gave up.

Bring in clusters with MPI and I for one don't want to go there.


On Tue, 14 Dec 2021 at 06:59, Greg Minshall <minshall using umich.edu> wrote:

> Jeff,
>
> > This sounds like an OS feature, not an R feature... certainly not a
> > portable R feature.
>
> i'm not arguing for it, but this seems to me like something that could
> be a language feature.
>
> cheers, Greg
>
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