[cl-debian] Anyone willing to package Cedilla?

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Peter,

I didn't have time to thank you for your packaging.  I have had a look
at your recent work, and I'm very happy with it.

For Cedilla, the current approach, while not perfect, is good enough.
However, I do think that you folks (as well as upstream Common Lisp
implementors) should be thinking about application delivery in the
medium term.

> - Using clc-require with a script (like it is done now)
> real    0m1.530s
> user    0m1.296s
> sys     0m0.160s

> - Concatenated all the fasls (in the right order) into one:
> real    0m1.255s
> user    0m1.004s
> sys     0m0.048s

On my system, with a warm cache,

  clc-require:                      0.384r, 0.349u + 0.031s
  Loading all the fasls one by one: 0.254r, 0.239u + 0.012s
  Loading the concatenated fasl:    0.268r, 0.247u + 0.016s
  Groff:                            0.041r, 0.033u + 0.008s

What's going on here?  You've got to realise that Cedilla builds large
hashtables at load time (see the generated file data.lisp).  On your
slowish system, building the hashtables appears to dominate the
startup time; on my faster system, building the hashtables takes less
time, and we're seeing the cost of the statting done by ASDF.

(Of course, the building happens before dumping an image, which
explains why dumping an image makes Cedilla so much faster.  Any
suggestions for making the loading of data.fas faster are welcome.)

I think that Cedilla is slightly atypical; other programs will most
likely not need to build such large hashtables at runtime.  Thus,
while the startup overhead is not a major problem for Cedilla, it is
something that should be solved in the medium term.

Oh, by the way, I'm not a great fan of dumped images; they use up
loads of space, and prevent the Lisp runtime from being shared between
Lisp processes.

Thanks again for your work,

                                        Juliusz