Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!samsung!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tekcrl!tekchips!kend
From: kend@tekchips.LABS.TEK.COM (Ken Dickey)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: LISP compiler?
Summary: linking standalone binaries
Message-ID: <5031@tekcrl.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 9 Nov 89 21:02:25 GMT
References: <5081@internal.Apple.COM>
Sender: ftp@tekcrl.LABS.TEK.COM
Lines: 68



Reply-To: kend@mrloog.WR.TEK.COM (Ken Dickey)
Followup-To: a.out
Distribution: 
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Keywords: Lisp, Scheme, linking

In article <5081@internal.Apple.COM> chewy@apple.com (Paul Snively) writes:
>In article <89Nov7.234038est.2758@neat.cs.toronto.edu> 
>rayan@cs.toronto.edu (Rayan Zachariassen) writes:
>> chewy@apple.com (Paul Snively) writes:
>> 
>> >A future version of MACL WILL do a treewalking dead-code stripper, 
>reducing 
>> >application sizes tremendously.
>> 
>> yah, well, this is nice but a bit shortsighted as a general solution.
>> 
>> - What I really want is to be able to run small standalone lisp 
>applications.
>> I want to write cat in list (for example) without it ending up as a 2Meg
>> binary.  This is addressed by the pruner you mention (someone from Lucid
>> told me they have one or are planning one too).
>> 
>> - I want to run *many* different standalone lisp programs.  Imagine
>> 30% of unix commands being implemented in lisp.  See where the code 
>stripping
>> idea falls short?  You'll have all this code duplicated in most commands.
>> 
>> Solution?  Put the Lisp runtime support into a shared image, which the
>> application link to when they start up, like (sun/svr4) shared libraries.
>> That is in fact what it is, the Lisp equivalent to libc.  All lisp 
>applications
>> would share the runtime text, and have independent data pages per 
>process.
>> 
>> One would think this isn't too complicated to do.
>
>Not only is it difficult to do under the current Macintosh operating 
>system, it's impossible.
>

Let's seperate out the 2 concerns:

  The key to being able to link an application--rather than GC and save
  an image--is not to call EVAL or the compiler.  Either of these must
  have a full runtime support since arbitrary code may be introduced.
  Without them, linking is relatively straight-forward.

  The Mac's (lack of) OS problem (no multitasking, & friends) are of a
  more severe nature.


A couple of date points:
  
  Standalone Mac applications can be generated by LightShip's
  MacScheme+ToolSmith. 

  Cadence Research System's Chez Scheme creates sharable binaries
  (Under Unix; I don't know if their VMS or Domain systems do this).
  They have an `Application Builder' which generates standalone
  binaries.


I hope this helps.

-Ken Dickey			kend@mrloog.WR.TEK.COM