Automatic state capture of self-migrating computations in Messengers

Abstract

With self-migrating computations, the main challenge is the extraction and subsequent restoration of the computation’s state during migration. This is very difficult when the navigational statement may be placed anywhere in the code and hence many systems place the burden of state capture on the application programmer. We describe an intermediate approach, where the use of navigational statements is restricted to the top level of the self-migrating computation. This permits an efficient implementation of a fully transparent state capture and restoration. We demonstrate that this approach is applicable not only to interpreted mobile code but also to compiled self-migrating computations executing entirely in native mode.