[armedbear-devel] ABCL vs SBCL quicklisp load time

[Mark Evenson]

On 05/11/13 1552 , Mark Evenson wrote:

>> Dave Tenny <dave.tenny at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> This  may be more of an ABCL question than a Quicklisp question I guess,
>>> but I haven't yet found a good place to ask ABCL questions of this type.
>>> I'll post this in the common-lisp group too.
>ring questions there.

> […] Since Quicklisp is
> intimately connected to ASDF which in turn is wedded at the hip to CLOS,
> loading Quicklisp in `~/.abclrc` effectively means that there are no
> time savings incurred by the autoload mechanism.
>
> Note that I "believe" this to be the case, not having actually verified
> by appropriate profiling, which would probably be easy to do by some
> combination of setting the [`abcl.autoload.verbose`][1]: Java property
> to collect various profiles of with/without Quicklisp/ASDF.
>
> [1]: http://abcl.org/trac/wiki/AbclJavaProperties

A retraction after a little further investigation: my hunch of long 
startup times for for ABCL with Quicklisp "because of the autoload 
mechanism" is mostly bogus.  This can be shown by the difference of 
CL:TIME profiles of loading Quicklisp with ASDF previous loaded:

tethys:~/work/asdf$ abcl --noinform --noinit --eval '(require :asdf)' 
--eval '(time (load "~/quicklisp/setup.lisp"))'
8.73 seconds real time
588035 cons cells

and without:

tethys:~/work/asdf$ abcl --noinform --noinit  --eval '(time (load 
"~/quicklisp/setup.lisp"))'
12.143 seconds real time
1044558 cons cells

The actual problem seems to lie more in how long it takes ABCL to load 
an ASDF system.  Some of this time seems to come from the autoload of 
the compiler, but the majority of time seems to be from simply loading 
the discrete FASLs on the filesystem.  We'll look into further 
optimization strategies for improving load times.

Followups to armedbear-devel@ please:  we return you to your regularly 
scheduled Quicklisp goodness.

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