Lifecycle of a Persistent Program

Program execution comprises the following stages:

Creation:

A program is first started and a new store is created.

Execution:

The program runs.

Suspension:

The user switches to another application. The current application is interrupted and made persistent.

Resumption:

The user resumes a previously suspended application. Execution will continue from the exact same state where it was left off.

Destruction:

The computation terminates. This can be caused either by calling System.exit, terminating the last non-daemon thread or by not catching an exception. The store is then deleted.

The next sections will describe these four stages and associated actions taken by the VM in more detail.