Submitted by “Chung-chieh Shan and [Oleg Kiselyov] have submitted a paper [.pdf] on delimited contexts in operating systems and the zipper OS (which has not been formally published). Systems programmers do use contexts whether they are aware of that or not. The first version of UNIX on PDP-7 already implemented delimited continuations, in the form of co-routines between user programs and the shell. Being aware of delimited continuations may help systems programmers to better implement context switching, signal handling, etc., using the techniques developed in programming language research. It also leads to new insights, for example, that checkpointing a process and snapshotting a file system are essentially the same activity.”
Not new. Read about Plan9 – http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/about.html
What does plan9 have to do with continuations?
Even the blurb above doesn’t suggest that this concept is new – they mention that this was in the original Unix. They are just trying to examine the concept and its implications. You don’t even have to read the article to tell that.
This sounds like an interesting concept and I look forward to reading about it.
You know how it is, on every forum you have one or more people who just comment for comments sake and point to another site, article, etc. that also mentions the same thing the story is talking about; but in the end it makes them look stupid.
I am always glad to see amazing research like this. An interesting paper that begs a number of questions.
If people keep talking about continuations at the operating-system level, my work won’t be original enough for me to take any substantial credit for it!
Umm.. excuse my ignorance. What does that mean?