[Ecls-list] Building ECL

[Jachym Holecek]

> >>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'm running w/o threads, but on a PIII-700, so the number would +-
coincide. Good to know it's not specific to my installation.

> 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.

Hmm, those ~8000 calls to sigprocmask() I observed on ktrace don't exactly
help I guess. I'll have a look over the weekend, hopefully.

	Regards,
		-- Jachym Holecek