[xcvb-devel] standalone backend

[Faré]

After many months, and in a frenzy of procrastination for more
important things to do, I completed last week the concurrent process
infrastructure necessary for XCVB to build things in parallel by
forking live images rather than starting from scratch.

The standalone build is not incremental yet, as I don't yet have a way
of storing dependency metadata between builds. Interestingly, things
work well in CCL, but several bugs plague the SBCL port:
* a bug in one of SBCL, CFFI  or IOlib causes corruption if GC happens
while building with SBCL as the master. That's really bad. Workaround
provided. (Allocate a large heap, GC before you build.)
* some bug on non-portable feature somewhere in SBCL and/or my code
causes the forker to fail to successfully open the named pipes when
SBCL is the slave.

I've independently been too tired / depressed / procrastinating to
isolate these two SBCL issues. Sigh. Maybe someone has more courage
than me with this regard. I've committed and pushed my state of the
system.

Note that you need my branch of CFFI and IOlib, QUUX-IOlib, and
several other such dependencies. Note also that iolib and quux-iolib
generate .so files, and that I don't at this point have a good
deployment story for these files. Plenty of ungrateful hours of coding
lie between here and such a story for the many CL implementations (or
even one of them). CL is a harsh mistress. I'm not sure I like her
anymore.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
What one person receives without working for, another person must work for
without receiving. — Adrian Rogers