Re: JoCaml rewritten ...

[Alan Schmitt <alan.schmitt@inria.fr>]

Hi,

If you want to know more about the dgc of JoCaml, you can have a look at
Fabrice Le Fessant's paper (he implemented the gc):
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lefessan/papers/index.html
As far as I understand it, the dgc is fairly robust (for instance it
uses a Lamport clock instead of a synchronized clock), and does not
consume too much bandwidth.

About your bytecode patch suggestion, there are several issues to
consider. At the moment, the only mechanism to update something in
JoCaml is to migrate to another runtime that provides modules that are
differently initialized (their code must be the same, it is checked for
safety). You might be interested to look at the theoritical work I did
on adding a form of binding based on location to the Join Calculus (the
formal model that resulted in JoCaml), which you may find at:
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~aschmitt/publications.html
(it's the safe dynamic binding paper). This is not implemented yet, but
I designed it with JoCaml in mind, and I'll try to implement it during
the rewrite.

I hope this answer some of your questions,

Alan

* Christopher Quinn (cq@htec.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> This is nice to know indeed!
> JoCaml appears to my untutored eye, a *superior* mobile code framework.
> One thing that troubles me though is the 'distributed garbage 
> collection' going on under the hood - what would this mean in terms of 
> reliance on reliable/fast comms facility?
> I have in mind distribution of software updates to desktop apps for 
> instance, where a process can be 'invited' into one's running desktop 
> app which will then pull in the necessary bytecode-patches and do 
> whatever housekeeping is necessary in order to bring the installation 
> up-to-date.
> Is distributed GC a fragile luxury inappropriate to such a setting? 
> (I probably don't properly understand D-GC!  I'm just vaguely worried 
> about the amount of comms going on/required .... )
> 
> Is there an echo in here .....   :o)
> 
> Cheers,
> Chris Quinn
> 


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