[E-Lang] Thoughts on Persistence in E.

[steve jenson]

Quoting Mark S. Miller (markm@caplet.com):

> * SturdyRef
>     Oops on this last.  I've reproduced your NullPointerException (that 
>     Elmer transcript was very useful), and will be fixing this.  In the 
>     meantime, as you've noticed, you can just use the cap: uri string.

One thing I'm trying to accomplish is to be able to persist an object
and it's SturdyRef, so that I can restart the vat, pull the object and
it's SturdyRef out of the pickle jar, and all the old caps I issued against
it will again be valid.   

This seems to force you to serialize an awful lot about your vat, and
more importantly, be able to recreate your vat's state. A quick glance
through the javadoc tells me that this is what NetConfig helps
with. Except that I didn't see a way to tell it what socket your vat
should be listening on.

>     Brand, Sealer, Unsealer, SealedBox

I suppose this is another email for another time but looking through the
java source for these confuses me. They don't seem to do much. At least,
they don't seem "strong". Are these ever going to be cryptographically
secure? Maybe I'm misjudging their use.  

> What do you mean by "class prototype"?

I merely mean the definition of a class, and not an instance of the class.
Sorry, I'll drop the "prototype" and lose the confusion.


> Also, objects defined in E do not yet persist, and they won't at least until 
> we start using Dean's transformer.  Dean's transformer also gives the 
> objects a representation that would be reasonable to save and restore.  The 
> current E interpreter does not.

I rather guessed this was the case.  


> I don't know "shelve", but ComstMaps should work now, and it sounds like 
> they might do the trick you're looking for.

yeah! that's awesome.


Thank you for the answers. 



steve

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steve jenson <stevej@sieve.net> http://sieve.net/
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