[asdf-devel] The future of ASDF (was logical pathnames)

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info> wrote:

> Lisp development --- at least for people like me --- is primarily an
> interactive process, and this is why building and loading/executing are
> /inextricably/ linked.
>

Please note that image driven development is NOT the only paradigm that
exists in the lisp world. ECL works very well at creating standalone
executables from compiled files, but it can not dump binary images of its
full environment because that can not be implemented portably across all
platforms we support -- specially not when one mixes shared libraries,
different memory management paradigms (C, lisp, C++, operating system) and
other stuff.

The problem is that people who are used to think on image driven development
are those who have pushed forward also the development of ASDF as it is
right now and indeed, with this mentality of an image where everything is
loaded there is no distinction between placing things an the *.asd file or
in the compiled files. In other words, the flexibility has propagated to the
users with an absolute lack of organization in how things are done right
now.

I even found out some libraries that ave problems in the dependencies,
because the image driven development has side effects, such as the creation
of macros, etc, which persist beyond compilation and can lead the developer
to think that a load-op succeeds when it will not in a fresh new image.

What I am trying to say is that ASDF "as is" need not stop working. We may
keep ASDF as a large database which you can use to power interactive
development and automatic recompilation as things change. I believe this is
a wonderful feature it is implicit in the long email I wrote.

However, ASDF has to seek other fields and in particlar enforce a discipline
such that existing systems can be built from scratch using different
paradigms -- for instance, building standalone programs from individual
components.

In other words, the image-driven system can not be the model on which ASDF
is built and it can not be part of its semantics because it prevents other
models, but it has to remain an option for those who want to use it.

I strongly believe that both things can and should coexist.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
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