METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR SYSTEM BUILDING WITH A TRANSACTIONAL INTERPRETER

A method and apparatus for system building with a transactional interpreter. Unlike interpreters of the prior art, a transactional interpreter permits large interpreter-based operations, such as a system build, to resume processing from a point within the operation, i.e., the most recently completed transaction, rather than restarting from the beginning when the operation is interrupted. Control over transaction processing is maintained at the virtual machine level by the interpreter, and is therefore transparent with respect to the user of the interpreting software. In one embodiment of the invention, a virtual machine comprises a computer system running a transactional interpreter process with an underlying database such as an object-oriented database. The transactional interpreter individually processes instructions from an input stack, and, between the processing of each instruction, determines whether a commit operation is to be performed, marking the end of a transaction. The length of a transaction can be defined in terms of a predetermined number of instructions, a predetermined time interval, or a combination of instructions and time interval. When a commit operation is performed, state information for the virtual machine, such as the contents of virtual machine registers, is written to persistent storage in the underlying database. Sufficient state information is maintained in persistent storage to return the virtual machine to the state of the last completed transaction in the event of an interruption in the interpreting process. Forward progress in the interpreting process is therefore maintained.