Loci

Overview

In Grasshopper, loci are the abstraction over execution. In its simplest form, a locus is simply the contents of the registers of the machine on which it is executing. Like containers, a locus is maintained by the Grasshopper kernel and is inherently persistent. Making the locus persistent is a departure from other operating system designs and frees the programmer from much complexity.

A locus is associated with a container, its host container. The locus perceives the host container's contents within its own address space. Virtual addresses generated by the locus map directly onto addresses within the host container. A container comprising program code, mutable data and a locus forms a basic running program. Loci are an orthogonal abstraction to containers. Any number of loci may execute within a given container; this allows Grasshopper to support multi-threaded programming paradigms.

See Also

Containers