In Scheme, procedures are closures, that means it has the code of the procedure itself as well as the required environment for running that procedure. And, mostly, continuations are considered closure.
Hence, it is reasonable to expect a way to serialize the closures to disks and/or remote machines over network. Usage: Stored procedures can be restored later or restored remotely which makes remote procedure call more easier. Problems are when these procedures contain reference to object outside the scheme, say, opened fds, acquired locks/mutexes these objects will lost. But hooks can be added to overcome these problems. Stored continuations can restored later to make program continue to running after system failure, or, in web application, can be used to finish a user transaction. also, stored continuations can be transferred to remote hosts to make process-migration. still hooks are needed when programmer need to deal with opened files and so on. existing implementations: Gambit-C: the termite module of gambit-c heavily depends on serializable closures to have functions like remote process call, process migration and remote spawn. chicken: chicken has termite port and also has these function implemented. I am porting termite to guile. that's why I am interesting in this.
