APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR TRANSFERRING STATE DATA WHEN PERFORMING ON-LINE REPLACEMENT OF A RUNNING PROGRAM CODE AND DATA

Apparatus and method are provided for transferring state data between computer software programs within the same software process. The apparatus and method does not require a special operating system, but instead only requires the use of a few standard operating system calls (i.e, fork and exec, etc.), so therefore is highly portable between different operating system machine types. The apparatus and method have complete flexibility to change arguments or return values and change calling order, function names, function code, and the like within the new version of the program.