State Spill in a Nutshell

State spill is a new term we've coined to describe the following phenomenon:

The state of a software entity undergoes a lasting change as a result of handling an interaction from another entity.

State spill is a root cause of many challenges in achieving the following advanced computing goals:
  • process migration
  • fault isolation
  • fault tolerance
  • live update
  • hot-swapping
  • virtualization of individual software entities
  • maintainability
  • security

    • See the paper for more details, or the poster if you're short on time.

    StateSpy repository

    StateSpy is open source under the MIT license and available here: Bitbucket repository.

    Modification Reachability Algorithm

    The full algorithm is availablle here (PDF).