[armedbear-devel] Summarizing "In-memory compilation status"

[Erik Huelsmann]

As pointed out, Alessio added some primitives required to add
in-memory compilation.

However, the rest of the thread seems to mix a number of issues and
their progress. As a result, I thought a summary might be in order.

There were several things "in-memory" versus "using files":

1. Compilation of functions in our JSR-223 support (Alessio changed
ABCL's behaviour here)
2. Compilation of lisp forms into compiled functions
3. Compilation of lisp files into fasls


With respect to (1): This is where Alessio changed ABCL's behaviour to
use COMPILE instead of COMPILE-FILE, eliminating the use of a single
temporary file.

With respect to (2): Currently, ABCL uses a temporary file for each
"compiland" (FLET/LABELS defined function, LAMBDA, DEFUN) in the forms
to be compiled. This file is created with a ".cls" extention. After
it's written, it gets loaded into the running jvm by loading the bytes
in a byte array. That byte array is then resolved to a class. ABCL
uses its own class loader to do so.
Because the the bytes get written and read without this being required
by the Java class loader, there should not be a need to write the
bytes out to a file. After the file has been read into memory, the
temporary file gets deleted.

With respect to (3): Each "compiland" in a file to be compiled leads
to a ".cls" file, which is created as a temp file, then read into
memory and after that written into the ".abcl" file - which as noted
is in fact a .zip file. The intermediate temp file is then deleted.
This process too takes much more I/O (what if you're compiling to a
network drive with this kind of I/O?!) then required.


It's with respect to items (2) and (3) that I'd like to see things
changed. In case of (2) there's no reason to send output to any type
of disc, while in case (3) it would be beneficial to write our output
straight into the ZIP file, instead of using intermediary files.


I'm looking for a good solution to both cases. One of the things I
came up with is some kind of "storage factory" which would be a
function to be called which either generates a stream sending output
to the ZIP, or an in-memory stream or a file-backed stream if that's
still required.


So, what are your comments to that?


Bye,

Erik.