[armedbear-devel] Binary FASL support

[Erik Huelsmann]

As the result of an attempt to reduce our startup time, I implemented
binary FASL support: a compiled lisp function (= Java class) which
gets executed instead of the interpreted forms which used to
constitute the texty fasl format. The texty format is still there, but
in case of a binary fasl only contains 2 forms to be evaluated, the
rest will be in the compiled function.

I don't feel like we achieved much: my startup times used to be 0.4 s
and 1.6 s and that doesn't seem to have changed. Bummer. However,
that's probably to be expected, because I was just guessing where our
performance issue would be: I want to know how much of the 0.4 and 1.6
seconds are actually spent waiting on I/O happening. In case we're
waiting big time on the data coming from the JAR, maybe there's an
optimization possible to the way we create/read the JAR file.


Any help on the subject of reducing our startup time would be most welcome!

Bye,


Erik.