[Ecls-list] Building ECL

[Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll]

Goffioul Michael wrote:

>>    -- The library takes about 3s to initialize (cl_boot() call) on my
>>       PeeCee, which is prohibitive for my needs (embedded 
>>${unix}-based
>>       devices). Or maybe I just mis-configured something? 
>>Runtime speed
>>       looks very good (coming from the C/UNIX world, I was
>>       subconsciously expecting Lisp to be _damn slow_ ;-).
>>
>>If this is in fact a bug, then I'd be glad to do some more debugging.
>>    
>>
>
>>From my experience, I know that ECL with threads support (compiled
>under MSVC) was *much* slower at start-up by a factor 2~3. Otherwise,
>ECL without threads support takes 1s to start-up on my P4-1700/680MB.
>
I will comment on the other points later, but startup time can be slow 
because internal data is serialized as text strings during compilation time.

One might achieve shorter start times either by dumping, as the GCL crew 
does, but this then leads to highly unportable code that breaks with 
every other release of the OS, or by finding a more efficient binary format.

But probably a greater improvement can be achieved with small effort by 
just profiling and finding out which reader functions are taking the 
most time.

Juanjo