[armedbear-devel] abcl and maxima

[Mark Evenson]

On 2/27/11 9:10 AM, Reinhard Oldenburg wrote:
> Dear All,
> after quite a while I came back to running maxima on abcl becaus there
> is an increasing interest in incorporationg maxima in Java based projects.
> Some time ago Mark explained that in principal loadinf form jars can be
> done, but it seems that it ned some time to twea maxima-load.lisp so
> that it loadsfrom a jar containing all the abcl files.
> Has anything happend on this in the meantime?

I couldn't find 'maxima-load.lisp' in the CVS HEAD version of the 
sources.  Is this file located somewhere else, perhaps in a secondary 
packaging mechanism/

We can currently load ASDF2 systems composed of source pretty easily 
from jar files.

I just packaged Maxima this way by the following steps:

1.  From CVS HEAD I patched 'src/maxima.asd' to get rid of the 
incompatible with ABCL's ASDF2 jar translation rules.

Index: src/maxima.asd
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/maxima/maxima/src/maxima.asd,v
retrieving revision 1.18
diff -u -r1.18 maxima.asd
--- src/maxima.asd	2 Jan 2011 06:11:33 -0000	1.18
+++ src/maxima.asd	27 Feb 2011 09:28:47 -0000
@@ -9,9 +9,9 @@
  ;; Don't try to optimize so much in ECL.
  ;; Therefore functions can be redefined (essential for share libraries).
  #+ecl (declaim (optimize (debug 2)))
-
+#+nil
  (defvar *binary-output-dir* "binary-ecl")
-
+#+nil
  (defmethod output-files :around ((operation compile-op) (c source-file))
    (let* ((source (component-pathname c))
          (source-dir (pathname-directory source))

2. Then I zipped up the contents of the 'src' directory in 'maxima.jar'

    unix$  zip -r maxima.jar src

3.  Then I pushed the JAR-PATHNAME containing the location of the 
directory containing 'maxima.asd' to the ASDF *CENTRAL-REGISTRY*

    CL-USER> (pushnew 
#P"jar:file:/Users/evenson/work/maxima/maxima.jar!/src/" 
asdf:*central-registry*)

Now, I can load Maxima from the JAR via (ASDF:LOAD-SYSTEM :maxima), 
which will compile the FASLS on first load according to the ASDF2 
TRANSLATE-OUTPUT-LOCATION rules.

Since you probably want to include the FASL (i.e. the '*.abcl') files in 
your distribution JAR, we have to come up with a way to coax ASDF2 
looking for such a cache in 'maxima.jar'.  This is the piece that is 
missing to my knowledge, although Alan Ruttenberg might have posted a 
patch about a year ago to have this work.  There was also much useful 
discussion on getting such a mechanism to load FASLs as part of the 
ASDF2 definition for ECL, as one might not have access to the gcc 
compiler at runtime.

-- 
"A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there
is nothing to compare to it now."