I'm just curious, is it possible to dump all the variables and current state of the program to a file, and then restore it on a different computer?!
Let's say that I have a little program in Python or Ruby, given a certain condition, it would dump all the current variables, and current state to a file.
Later, I could load it again, in a different machine, and return to it.
Something like VM snapshot function.
I've seen here a question like this, but Java related, saving the current JVM and running it again in a different JVM. Most of the people told that there was nothing like that, only Terracotta had something, still, not perfect.
Thank you.
To clarify what I am trying to achieve:
Given 2 or more Raspberry Pi's, I'm trying to run my software at Pi nº1, but then, when I need to do something different with it, I need to move the software to Pi nº2 without dataloss, only a minor break time.
And so on, to an unlimited number of machines.
Good question.
In Smalltalk, yes.
Actually, in Smalltalk, dumping the whole program and restarting is the only way to store and share programs. There are no source files and there is no way of starting a program from square zero. So in Smalltalk you would get your feature for free.
The Smalltalk VM offers a hook where each object can register to restore its externals resources after a restart, like reopening files and internet connections. But also, for example integer arrays are registered to that hook to change the endianness of their values on case the dump has been moved to a machine with different endianness.
This might give a hunch at how difficult (or not) it might turn our to achieve this in a language which does not support resumable dumps by design.
All other languages are, alas, much less live. Except for some Lisp implementation, I would not know of any language which supports resuming from a memory dump.
Which is a missed opportunity.
Saving the stack?