[pro] Are you an Imager or a Filer?

[Nick Levine]

(Sorry I haven't yet had time to read other responses: am on the road
and buried under both 6 inches of Ohio snow and an end month
deadline. So apologies if I'm restating other people.)

I'm both.

Development uses images which are primed to check that the system is
up to date (and to correct that as appropriate) on startup. That way
we get rapid startup but everything compiled up to date.

Occasionally it doesn't look too good (say, an annoying number of GF
signatures changed since the image was saved) and the effort of
hand-holding the start-time system reload outweighs the effort of
rebuilding. Then I quit and rebuild. Mostly when I rebuild I don't
force the compile, but if (say) I've been messing with a pervasive
macro I'll go all the way.

We've recently introduced the change that force compilation does a
force compile of the whole system twice. This allows us to generate
warnings on incorrect calls to functions defined later in the
system. We aim for the compilation to be warning-free.

The product we ship can't do the above (LispWorks "delivered" image:
royalty free but no compile-file) but then we wouldn't want to. The
applications come with a patch loader (startup check for fasls in a
particular directory).

In case this is a relevant data point: we're developing three
applications, 70k lines of code, with a shared library of about 15k
lines.

- nick