java快照是什么,Dart的快照和Java字节码有什么区别？

I've been reading up on Dart snapshots, and they're frequently compared to Smalltalk images. But to me, they sound alot like Java bytecode.

For example:

"A Dart snapshot is just a binary serialization of the token stream, generated from parsing the code. A snapshot is not a "snapshot of a running program", it's generated before the tokens are turned into machine code. So, no program state is captured in a snapshot."

Plus they're cross-platform:

"The snapshot format itself is cross-platform meaning that it works between 32-bit, 64-bit machines and so forth. The format has been made so that it's quick to read into memory with a emphasis on minimizing extra work like pointer fixups."

Am I getting it wrong somewhere?

解决方案

Snapshots contain the VM data structures representing the loaded script in a serialized form similar to Smalltalk images. To get a better understanding of what is contained in the snapshot, we should take a look at what the Dart VM creates as it reads the script:

Library objects, referring to all top-level structures such as classes or top-level methods and variables.

Class objects, containing all objects describing all methods and fields.

Script and Tokenstream objects representing all loaded source code.

String objects for all used identifiers and string constants in the source code.

This object graph is serialized into a file when generating a snapshot using a format that is architecture agnostic. This allows the Dart VM to deserialize this snapshot file on 32-bit or 64-bit machines and recreate all of the necessary internal VM data structures much quicker than reading the original scripts from a set of files (see John's answer).

To clarify John's answer a bit. The Dart VM does not parse ALL of the source code when generating the snapshot. It only needs to parse the top level of the sources to be able to extract class, method and field definitions as these are represented in the serialized graph. In particular method bodies are not parsed and as it is customary for a scripting language errors will be only reported once control reaches the particular method.

The purpose of Java bytecodes is entirely different as Ladicek points out. You could create a snapshot of the VM data structures in a JVM once the bytecodes are loaded to get a similar effect.

In short: The snapshot contains an efficient representation of all the data structures allocated on the Dart VM heap which are needed to start executing the script.

-Ivan