[pypy-dev] Questions for Armin

[Bengt Richter]

Hello Armin,

At 10:50 2003-01-19 -0800, Armin Rigo wrote:
>Hello Bengt,
>
>On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 11:25:52PM -0800, Bengt Richter wrote:
>> I'm also  picking this  place  to re-introduce  the  related
>> "checkpointing" idea, namely some  call into a builtin  that
>> can act  like  a yield  and  save  all the  state  that  the
>> compiler/psyco etc have worked up.
>
>This might probably be done without Psyco, and would certainly be a nice thing
>to have.  Note that a good Psyco could remove any need for it: most
>initialization code could theoretically be specialized into something that
>just creates the necessary data structures without executing any code at all.

There seems to be something I missed. Could you clarify how such specialized
versions persist so they don't have to be redone? I.e., how do you get from
an original .py source-only representation to the specialized form, and how
does the latter come to exist? I.e., is this a new form of incrementally
updated .pyc?

>Sometimes I like to point out that if our OS were written in a high-level
>language with built-in specializers, they would boot in no more than the time
>it takes to do the actual I/O that occurs when booting (mainly displaying the
>login screen and waiting for mouse, keyboard and network input) --- everything
>else is internal state and can be done lazily.

If this means dynamic incremental revisions of system files, it must be a whole
new class of security issues to nail down, or am I misconstruing?

Regards,
Bengt Richter