Provide a means for obtaining a snapshot of the system

[teymour-aldridge]

One very useful technique for debugging is to be able to take a complete snapshot of the system.

An outline of some possible algorithms is given in https://mk.cs.msu.ru/images/5/52/Lecture-DA-11.pdf

[bkolobara]

Just to clarify, you mean a snapshot of the whole distributed system (including snapshots of all processes)?

I don't think we can do snapshots of individual processes at the moment (see). Maybe we would also require our own engine to accomplish this truly complete process state snapshots (see).

Another approach here could be to define a process state on the library level and be able to serialise the state at any point and somehow sync it up across the distributed system. This wouldn't require any changes to the vm and could be definitely something worth exploring.

[teymour-aldridge]

Yes, for the whole distributed system.

It's not an immediate priority by any means, but in the more long-term feature it would be really nice for Lunatic to be able to provide useful debugging information!

[bkolobara]

Debugging distributed systems is so hard nowadays and I would love if we could improve the current state of things in this area.