Paul Khuong mostly on Lisp

Closures are serialised by saving information about their lexical environment at compile-time, and the values of the variables they close over at runtime. More accurately, the fully macroexpanded (another possible conflict with codewalked extensions) source of a function that will reconstruct the complete lexical environment of the closure, given the values of closed variables, and then recreate the closure in that environment, is generated. That source is compiled lazily, when needed, while the server is running. While this should increase the speed at which programs are compiled, it can be undesirable. (ensure-all-builders) will compile, in advance, all the deserialising functions.

Note that, in order to save space, lexical environments that are identical modulo the equivalence of uninterned symbols are considered equivalent. In any case, using uninterned symbols for equality (as opposed to lexical variables or function) is a bad idea, since their identity is not preserved by a print -> read round-trip. While using symbol-name would make sense, using strings sounds like a better idea.

Once the deserialising function has been generated, it is associated with an unique closure descriptor number and saved in a global hash table. The descriptor is used during serialisation instead of the source itself to save space and improve speed. A serialisable closure is thus defined by a closure descriptor number and a list of the values it closes over (in an arbitrary but important order).

Since both the descriptors (numbers) and the deserialising functions (or, rather, their source) can be printed readably, they can easily be serialised to migrate to another server or to improve load balancing and redundancy.

Finally, continuations are simply lists of (serialisable) closures, generated at runtime by the bind and dbind macros, and are printed as such. Since *print-circle* is bound to T during serialisation (printing), sharing within a single continuation is preserved. Object identity, however, is not, except for interned symbols.