[armedbear-devel] packaging external libs with abcl

[Matthew D. Swank]

On Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:25:07 +0200
Alessio Stalla <alessiostalla at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Matthew D. Swank <akopa at charter.net>
> wrote:
> > I've been messing with running abcl on the google appengine, and I
> > was wondering what was the best way to package libraries,
> > especially the results of loading an asdf system and its
> > dependencies?
> 
...

> Now, afaik asdf can only load from files, so the jar contains a main
> class written in Java that detects if it's been launched from a jar,
> and if it is, it extracts the jar in a temporary directory and uses
> asdf to load the system from there. This of course cannot work on
> AppEngine; maybe the patch to load from jars addresses this issue as
> well?
> 

Well whether it's in a jar, or on the (r/o) file system, the classes in
the .abcl files have to loaded in to the "image" at runtime, correct?

I could just make the precompiled lisp files available on the file
system, and let asdf load them in my app entry point.  Also, if I
needed the files to be packaged as jars, or if I didn't want the
overhead of asdf searching the system dependencies, I could capture the
load order that asdf generates when it compiles the systems and load
them in proper order directly.  

Of course this all gets a bit messy if library code depends on the asdf
systems being available at runtime.  Also, can all this happen fast
enough to serve a request?

Matt
-- 
"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to
your grandmother." -- Albert Einstein.