Analagous to an APL Workspace - a tclsh which is persistent between restarts ... checkpoints its entire contents to disk.

One such is Coldtcl http://sharedtech.dyndns.org/~colin/coldtcl.tar.gz
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'''Purpose''':

If you have a large enough persistent process, you don't really need external storage.
Per-process VM size is around 2Gb.

So, you don't need a db, you can just store stuff in tcl data types.

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'''Coldtcl - tcl workspace'''

- ''[Colin McCormack] <coldstore at users dot sf dot net> 30/05/2004''

Coldtcl http://sharedtech.dyndns.org/~colin/coldtcl.tar.gz

Coldtcl makes tcl 8.5 (and earlier) checkpointable.  Runs under Linux, YMMV.
It's based on my work on ColdStore.

Run it using ./coldtcl and you'll get a tclsh in all respects identical to your usual.

It provides a single command - [suspend] which writes the complete running state
of tclsh to disk in a file called coldtcl.store containing all current state of the tclsh.

A subsequent invocation of coldtcl will load coldtcl.store and restart with the entire
tclsh state restored exactly as it was when [suspend] was called.

The only complication is open files.  It is necessary to close all open files in
any interpreter under {} before calling [suspend], not doing so will cause
unpredictable results ... I doubt you'll enjoy them.
The exceptions are stdin, stdout and stderr, which are recreated anew on
every invocation.

If your workspace calls [exit] (for example as a result of an error,) you'll be left with
an unusable store.  It's probably a good idea, therefore, to modify [exit] accordingly.
I'll come up with a simple example, if people need it.

There's always the possibility that coldtcl leaks memory ... I can't be sure yet.

There's not a chance it'll suspend and resume multiple threads.  It might work if you
shut down all but the original thread, I don't know.  Quite possible.

coldtcl depends upon mmalloc, which it GPL'd, it is therefore, perforce, also GPL'd.

'''Performance''':

Coldtcl uses an mmap malloc to write its per-process swap to a file.  This means it'll run as fast as normal tclsh, there should be no real difference to the usual tclsh.