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Using a “core dump” (dumping the webassembly heap) is an interesting optimization approach with historical precedent both in TeX itself and projects like Emacs

Using a “core dump” (dumping the webassembly heap) is an interesting optimization approach with historical precedent both in TeX itself and projects like Emacs (dump/unexec) — https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Building-Emacs.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Bu... It’s also notoriously fragile and non-portable on native targets; I’m curious how one implements it under webassembly, and how it compares.

drfuchs 2y ago
Being able to start a process, have it run for a bit to, say, read in initialization data, populating dynamic data structures along the way, and then interrupt the process and save the whole state as a new executable, was a feature built into DEC’s Tops10 and Tops20 operating systems / standard runtimes, along with related custom systems like Waits, under which TeX was developed. It took just two lines of code for TeX to implement its side of this feature on those first platforms. It came as a bit of a shock at the time that all the Unix-y systems had no such native concept, and that fragile, non-portable user-space schemes were required to mimic this functionality.
- vdm 2y ago
  Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace https://criu.org/ https://criu.org/
- kisonecat 2y ago
  Resurrecting this workflow was one of the funniest things in implementing TikZJax.
kisonecat 2y ago
Author of TikZJax here... I'm endlessly distracted by other things at work, but I believe this same idea could also be used to provide real-time compilation of TeX'd documents as they're typed. Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo had suggested wanting something like a real-time Overleaf to teach his classes at https://eulercircle.com/ https://eulercircle.com/ Interrupting and resurrecting the TeX-in-the-browser would let you render a document as it is typed.
- svat 2y ago
  See also (if you haven't already) SwiftLaTeX ( https://www.swiftlatex.com/ https://www.swiftlatex.com/ https://github.com/SwiftLaTeX https://github.com/SwiftLaTeX ) and their paper (DOI: 10.1145/3209280.3209522 ).

drfuchs 2y ago

Being able to start a process, have it run for a bit to, say, read in initialization data, populating dynamic data structures along the way, and then interrupt the process and save the whole state as a new executable, was a feature built into DEC’s Tops10 and Tops20 operating systems / standard runtimes, along with related custom systems like Waits, under which TeX was developed. It took just two lines of code for TeX to implement its side of this feature on those first platforms. It came as a bit of a shock at the time that all the Unix-y systems had no such native concept, and that fragile, non-portable user-space schemes were required to mimic this functionality.

vdm 2y ago
Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace https://criu.org/ https://criu.org/
kisonecat 2y ago
Resurrecting this workflow was one of the funniest things in implementing TikZJax.

kisonecat 2y ago

Author of TikZJax here... I'm endlessly distracted by other things at work, but I believe this same idea could also be used to provide real-time compilation of TeX'd documents as they're typed. Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo had suggested wanting something like a real-time Overleaf to teach his classes at https://eulercircle.com/ https://eulercircle.com/ Interrupting and resurrecting the TeX-in-the-browser would let you render a document as it is typed.

svat 2y ago
See also (if you haven't already) SwiftLaTeX ( https://www.swiftlatex.com/ https://www.swiftlatex.com/ https://github.com/SwiftLaTeX https://github.com/SwiftLaTeX ) and their paper (DOI: 10.1145/3209280.3209522 ).