Sandboxing computations in the Mu computer

A 2-minute video showing off the Mu computer's prototyping environment.

The Mu computer's prototyping environment pervasively uses a trace to help explain and debug programs. However the trace is expensive to compute and makes the environment laggy. In the past few weeks I came up with a way to make things more efficient by capturing only a shallow slice of the trace, and by transparently recomputing the trace on demand. This is only possible because the entire stack makes it easy to sandbox computations, and that in turn is only possible because every function explicitly states its dependencies.