Orthogonal persistency

In computer science, persistence refers to the characteristic of state that outlives the process that created it. This is achieved in practice by storing the state as data in computer data storage. Programs have to transfer data to and from storage devices and have to provide mappings from the native programming-language data structures to the storage device data structures.

Picture editing programs or word processors, for example, achieve state persistence by saving their documents to files.

Persistence is said to be "orthogonal" or "transparent" when it is implemented as an intrinsic property of the execution environment of a program. An orthogonal persistence environment does not require any specific actions by programs running in it to retrieve or save their state.

Non-orthogonal persistence requires data to be written and read to and from storage using specific instructions in a program, resulting in the use of persist as a transitive verb: On completion, the program persists the data.

The advantage of orthogonal persistence environments is simpler and less error-prone programs.

Orthogonal persistence is widely adopted in operating systems for hibernation and in platform virtualization systems such as VMware and VirtualBox for state saving.

Research prototype languages such as PS-algol, Napier88, Fibonacci and pJama, successfully demonstrated the concepts along with the advantages to programmers.

Using system images is the simplest persistence strategy. Notebook hibernation is an example of orthogonal persistence using a system image because it does not require any actions by the programs running on the machine. An example of non-orthogonal persistence using a system image is a simple text editing program executing specific instructions to save an entire document to a file.

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