Introspecting continuations in order to update active code

Jérémy Buisson (1) , Fabien Dagnat (1)

1 INFO - Département informatique

In the case of critical systems and dynamic environments, it is necessary to apply bug fixes and functional enhancements at runtime. Mainly due to technical difficulties, updating active code is usually considered impractical. Most of researches on dynamic software update therefore prevent changing active code. In this paper, we study how to express manipulations of the execution state in terms of operations on continuations, thus enabling update of active code. We explore how language support can help doing so in a type-safe manner thanks to specific operators.

Mots clés: DSU; continuation; control operator; dynamic update of active code; introspection of execution states; language construct; typing

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Jérémy Buisson, Fabien Dagnat. Introspecting continuations in order to update active code. International Workshop On Hot Topics In Software Upgrades, Oct 2008, Nashville, United States. pp.4, ⟨10.1145/1490283.1490289⟩. ⟨hal-00498583⟩