[gambit-list] Gambit's Linking Model

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Wed Jun 13 22:20:21 EDT 2007


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 13-Jun-07, at 9:45 PM, Guillaume Cartier wrote:

> Thanks Marc. These results are *very* interesting!
>
> 2 questions:
>
> 1- Will Gambit do as good a job in optimizing the code if I package my
> application as a bunch of .o1 files than if I had compiled them  
> together
> in one executable?

Yes... if no declarations are used.  If your code uses the  
declaration (declare (block)) then inter-procedural optimizations are  
possible (such as inlining) within that file.  Of course if you want  
to be able to redefine functions (as seems to be the case for Jazz)  
then you cannot use this declaration.

There is a slight advantage with the single executable because the  
global variables can be statically resolved, but this is a very small  
factor in my experience.

> 2- If the answer to 1- is yes, then the only remaining thorn is to  
> have
> to actually untar the .o1 files. Almost all modern languages like  
> Python
> (.pyc), Java (.class), ... enable code distribution inside compressed
> archives which is really nice and easy for the developer and for  
> the end
> user (it would annoy me if Mercurial upon install extracted it's 300+
> .pyc files to my hard disk instead of keeping them in a neat  
> library.zip
> file).

But what's the difference for the user in having the package in one  
"library.zip" file or in one *directory* "library" containing a bunch  
of .o1 files?  This reminds me of the Mac OS format for  
applications.  In Mac OS 9 an application is in a single specially  
formatted file which contains several "resources".  In Mac OS X an  
application is in a hierarchically structured .app directory.  So it  
seems the "trend" is away from specially formatted files!

> Do you think something could be done to load the .o1 files
> directly from an archive? This could be a wonderful code distribution
> mechanism for Gambit too.

The problem is that the .o1 files are loaded with "dlopen" (Unix) and  
"LoadLibrary" (Windows), and these expect the file to be directly  
accessible on the file system.  I am not aware of any workaround.

Marc

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFGcKXl//V9Zc2T/v4RApowAKCFv+ewmkLlI3rhd+aQFnW6IutZHACeMYtO
g3tC90dlvq7cWIZunkANf+0=
=ffne
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----



More information about the Gambit-list mailing list