Saving execution state -- something like protothreads but without using labels as values?

Question

I'm trying to find a way to serialize execution/stack state, in such a way that the state can be archived and restored at a later time where execution can be made to pick up where it left off. Sort of like continuations, but with the feature that the stack state should be able to be serialized to disk and rehydrated on subsequent runs. I'm working in C (and/or Objective-C, if that helps.)

Protothreads looked somewhat close to what I'm looking for, but uses the GCC labels-as-values extension to resume from stored state. It seems to me that this is not likely to be robust for serialization/deserialization of the state across different compilations (and probably not even across runs of the same binary in the presence of ASLR.) In the abstract, there are going to be versioning challenges to be sure, but it doesn't seem like protothreads even gets that far.

I guess the canonical approach here would be to convert the code to a state machine, and then serialize/deserialize the state of the SM, but I find it a lot easier to think in terms of code, and struggle to envision how one would go about translating large swaths of non-trivial code into a state machine (even assuming that said code already has no global state or non-serializable heap structures, etc.)

It seems likely that any viable approach is going to require you to make allowances for it in your code. I imagine you'd have to store all your stack state in a "managed" stack structure that mirrored the stack, etc. I suspect it won't come "free", but I guess I'm hoping someone has already invented this wheel.

Anyone know of tools/libraries that address this problem, or alternately some method for converting arbitrary (but conforming) code into a serializable state machine? I found ragel, which goes the other way (SM specification -> code), but nothing generalize going this way.

I have subsequently discovered that C#'s compiler converts yield-based IEnumerator implementations into state machines in private/anonymous inner classes, so I guess it is possible to automate this for arbitrary code. Anyone know of a generalized method of doing this? (i.e. assuming you could structure the code like a yielding iterator.)