[Ecls-list] Building ECL

[Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll]

Jan Rychter wrote:

>I have tried building ecls (CVS HEAD) in various configurations, mostly
>to estimate its space requirements. I encountered some problems: [...]
>  
>
Solved on CVS. Statically linked executables are produced now if you use 
--disable-shared. No other option is required.

>And another question, this one unrelated to the build process. Is there
>a way to save byte-compiled code to files and load them subsequently? I
>didn't find any mention of it in the manuals. It would be really useful
>for small embedded systems where space is limited -- I'm assuming the
>bytecode representation is significantly more compact than shared
>libraries that have gone through the C compiler. I'm willing to live
>with smaller execution speed, but space is a premium issue.
>
This is indeed a mayor concern for me. Having a printable representation 
of bytecodes would be very easy: bytecodes are made of a vector of 
uint16 (bytecodes.codes), plus a vector of lisp objects containing the 
data that is manipulated by the function (bytecodes.data) and optionally 
a lexical environment if the function was a closure (bytecodes.lex). One 
should simply

1) choose a reader macro that does not interfere with what an user 
expects from the reader. In think in clisp it is #Y
2) write a function for this reader macro.
3) extend si_write_ugly_object() for printing bytecodes with the same 
syntax.
4) optionally, add machinery in the compiler so that functions can be 
stored as bytecodes instead of as C code.

So the answer is that there is no way to serialize bytecodes yet, but it 
would be a couple of days effort for somebody familiar with ECL's 
internals... Or also a nice way to _become_ familiar with it I would be 
willing to review the patches ;-)

Finally, it is yet unclear to me whether serializing bytecodes is more 
efficient that doing a gzip on a source file. After all, since by 
default bytecodes keep debugging information, your bytecodes will be 
full with the symbols for the variables, the data of the function, etc.

Juanjo