FC7 plan comments

[Callum Lerwick]

On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 17:36 -0500, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> With FF2 if you just close the window it saves its state now and will 
> happily restore, SM or not.

Exactly. Trying to handle this stuff centrally shows no signs of working
very well, and is it even necessary? Each individual app can save and
restore its own state just fine.

Someday I'll write a long babble about my grand vision of "persistent
computing", and it will turn out someone else has already beat me to it
anyway. Basically, all apps are to checkpoint all their state on an
ongoing basis. This has been partly implemented in a lot of apps already
in the name of "crash recovery", which is nice but we can go beyond
that...

If Done Right(TM), kernel level hibernation would be obsolete. Instead
of blindly dumping the entirety of RAM onto disk, each app could
intelligently checkpoint their state and shut down. (And since the apps
should be constantly checkpointing anyway, they'll already have this
done...)

... From what I've seen, PDA/HPC/etc operating systems (Newton,
WinCE...) already have this down pat. You can hit the reset button, or
lose power completely, and once rebooted, everything appears exactly as
it was.

Web apps are also a good example, though that's kinda cheating because
you've just moved everything to a central server...
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