Sending Computations in Progress

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Something I’ve just thought of that I’m sure there’s a lot of prior history on-
What’s the current state of sending ‘in progress’ computations?

I was just thinking about things that seem unnecessarily hard and two of those were-
Asking someone else for help, for which the state of the art is either being in the same room or using screen sharing. It seems like, being able to send your running program to someone for them to mess with would be extremely cool. Bonus points if somehow both people could mess at once, though this seems like it would need a Lot of application specific work to pull off.

And the other thing was returning to a previous state, which would be much easier if a running program could be saved as easily as a file

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In modern Smalltalks (at least Pharo, but probably also Squeak), the current state of a computation is an object that you can serialize to a file (using the library Fuel) and transfer to another machine for inspection, continuation, etc. People do this occasionally to get help with debugging. It’s a bit of work, and the file to transfer can become quite large. But it’s possible.

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