Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Continuations and VMs

Wednesday, April 2, 2003

Continuations and VMs

Dan Sugalski is continuing his series of articles on the Parrot VM. Recently he's written two articles on continuations.

I'm going to have to read through them a few times. I've always heard that a continuation represents "the rest of the program", but I never understood how the heck they're supposed to be used, nor how they actually represent an entire particular program state.

After skimming the articles, they reminded me of this bit on using continuations to speed up OS kernels. I wonder if any of the issues brought up in that paper (which I haven't read, mind you) could be applied to the Parrot VM?

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Programming | id 3695

18:03 (utc-5)

Comments

The paper is definitely interesting, and while I've not read the whole thing yet (at 147 pages it may take a while) I'm not sure if I'll be able to snag much out of it, as it's talking about things well below where I can tread with Parrot. (As nice as it might be, I can't go running parrot code in kernel mode, or co-opting the PMMU. Unfortunately. I could do some really cool things then...

I'm not 100% sure I agree with one of the premises of the paper, though, that going with a continuation scheme would give a performance boost, as there are some required costs with continuations that aren't there in the more traditional scheme. Still, y'never know...

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