1. CRIU is working on incremental checkpoints to allow for a similar sharing: http://criu.org/Incremental_dumps http://criu.org/Incremental_dumps . On the files

1. CRIU is working on incremental checkpoints to allow for a similar sharing: http://criu.org/Incremental_dumps http://criu.org/Incremental_dumps . On the filesystem layer, Docker's commits are definitely diffs I believe. 2. If you have internal sockets, they should be fully functional (for example, you spawn a child_process that you connect and talk to -- which is cool for debugging streams, etc). If the socket exists to the outside, I believe it should be fine as long as the checkpoint happens between messages. However, this is an area that both CRIU ( http://criu.org/TCP_connection http://criu.org/TCP_connection ) and we are working on pretty heavily to make talking to the "outside world" reasonable (we'll be sharing more on this soon). 3. There are a bunch of uses cases (from a place to easily try new packages since Tonic actually out of the box has access to every version of every package on npm, to writing live documentation, etc). A large inspiration for me was noticing that most programmers seem to start their projects in a REPL, then at some point have to make the transition to a file. We're hoping Tonic can stretch out that time period you spend in the friendlier repl environment (since tonic is closer to using an actual file), and best of all, when you're done you can actually save the repl as a node module and so you have the beginnings of your project instead of starting over.