[Armedbear-devel] Monolithic fasls (Was Re: How to load compiled Lisp stuff from a jar)

[Mark Evenson]

On 11/28/14 21:16, Robert P. Goldman wrote:
[…]
> I'm a little confused: doesn't ABCL use ASDF-JAR *instead* of Fare's
> monolithic-<foo> operations? So are you looking to harmonize the two in
> some way?

We attempt to support both methods, and are not currently looking to
harmonize.  ASDF-JAR originated from the JVM host for ABCL:  since the
jar file is the unit of distribution for most Java applications, it
seemed natural to be able to distribute ABCL applications in such units.
 Monolithic fasls came from ASDF's support for ECL which Erik saw as
easy to support with a small amount of additional work on ABCL.

> I don't claim to understand [monolithic fasls].  Faré put them in before I took over,
> I believe mostly for the benefit of ECL. My attempts to use them with
> ABCL (as you know) have always failed for me: on the Mac the jar
> pathnames get garbled in ways I don't understand.  We had some
> correspondence about this, but I don't think either of us were able to
> figure it out.

Hmm, I can't find the record of our correspondence.  From what I
remember, I eventually traced the error you encountered down to OS X's
use of a symlink for the temporary directory root, and fixed ABCL.  A
fair amount of wall clock time elapsed (on the order of months) before I
managed to figure out what was wrong, so I think ASDF has dropped the
failing test, as you had, understandably, moved on.

> As far as symbol obsolescence, what's going on is that we decided the
> original names weren't very clear, so the operations got renamed.
> Unfortunately, there had already been a release, so instead of just
> renaming them, we kept both names, with the old names left around and
> deprecated.  I'll probably blow them away whenever ASDF 3.2 rolls around.

There should be some documentation for monolithic fasls, somewhere, at
some point, which, once I figure things out, I will be happy to
contribute.

Do monolithic FASLs work on MKCL, since ECL is effectively dead?  If
not, then we should probably document things in the ABCL manual.  But
then that approach is a little odd, as the majority of the code resides
in ASDF.  But it seems a bit out of place to document something in the
ASDF manual that only applies to one, and possibly two, Common Lisp
implementations.


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

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