[armedbear-devel] Forking new ABCL processes cheaply (was Re: asdf and windows vs unix on abcl)

[Alessio Stalla]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 10:51 PM, Mark Evenson
<evenson.not.org at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 24, 2011, at 22:42 , Alessio Stalla wrote
>
> […]
>
>> I believe Faré's reason for starting a new image is to have it clean
>> of any side-effects of previous compilations. Strictly speaking, this
>> would only be possible if the JVM supported fork() or save-image, but
>> unfortunately it doesn't and will probably never do. However, I have
>> an idea for a compromise that would not get you a truly fresh new
>> image, but could nevertheless create a new environment clean enough
>> for most use cases. I don't have the time to go into details now, but
>> that's definitely something I've been wanting to experiment with for
>> some time.
>
> Certainly sounds interesting.  A FRESH-IMAGE contrib perhaps?

I will think about it.
I should also note that with appropriate classloader manipulation you
can already start multiple ABCL images in the same JVM, but that
doesn't help much because each one will load from scratch and take a
long time.