[armedbear-devel] In-memory compilation status

[Alessio Stalla]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 5:19 PM, John Pallister<john at synchromesh.com> wrote:
> Hi Alessio, thanks for that explanation (and sorry for my potentially
> ill-informed questions...).
>
> So if the (compressed) FASL format is a Zip archive containing the
> class files, would it be worth compiling local functions to an
> in-memory Zip/JAR image along with the top-level forms' classes, and
> then COMPILE-FILE can write the whole JAR to disk as the FASL (and
> everyone else can discard it)? (This may be like what happens now; the
> Wiki page on FASL formats is a bit ambiguous, and I admit I haven't
> looked through the ABCL code yet.)

Well that would be the optimal solution imho. What happens now IIRC is
something like this:

an uncompressed FASL file is created for each top-level function
(form?), along with companion fasls for local functions. Then all
these files are packaged in a jar/zip if compile-file is used, or the
only one top-level function is loaded via loadCompiledFunction and all
the files deleted, if compile is used.

> Anyway, on the strength of this brief discussion I can/should/will now
> go away and poke through the code. If/when I come up with anything
> interesting I shall report back to the list.

That is much appreciated!

Thanks,
Alessio