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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: can we ever compile perl?
Message-ID: <18531:Dec1709:14:5490@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 17 Dec 90 09:14:54 GMT
References: <1990Dec13.034336.21769@usenet@scion.CS.ORST.EDU> <93725765@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <1990Dec15.161911.27401@NCoast.ORG>
Organization: IR
Lines: 14

In article <1990Dec15.161911.27401@NCoast.ORG> allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes:
> I mentioned this to Larry once; he pointed out that Perl's internal structures
> aren't particularly easy to save/restore in a portable way.  Of course, it
> might be possible to write(savefd, etext, sbrk(0) - etext), but this is also
> nonportable.

I wrote pmckpt exactly to prove that a checkpointer *can* be portable.
pmckpt assumes all the basic UNIX process structure. It doesn't make any
allowances for systems that don't conform (except that it automatically
figures out which way your stack grows). Yet people have reported pmckpt
working on several System V variants, as well as BSD. How much more
portable can you get?

---Dan