From: Jimmy Thrasher <jjthrash@...>
Date: 2001-08-25T21:15:19+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:20366] Freezing state in the Ruby interpreter (RCR?)

Unlike Java and Smalltalk, Ruby doesn't have any file/class bindings.
So when one wants to, say, reload the contents of a class, checking
for update, one can't guarantee that simply loading the file that the
class was first found in would guarantee reloading of all the
functionality that the class held, since other files could have given
it more functionality.

So, what I think would be Really Cool is the ability to freeze the
state of the interpreter at a given point and be able to restore to
that point.  That is, if at one point in the code I say:

freezeState("statelabel")

and at another point in the code I were to say:

restoreState("statelabel")

the entire interpreter would go back to the state where it was at the
original freezeState.  This would include all modules loaded, where the
instruction pointer is, etc.

On one hand, this seems like an idea limited in use, but I think it
would help out in a lot of things, since Ruby is so flexible and flows
like a script as opposed to something like Java, where extra-method
ordering of statements doesn't really matter.

Now, this could be implemented in terms of Ruby Behaviors, but I don't
know enough about the behaviors to tell if they're that generic.

Any ideas?

Jimmy