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From: wade@su-russell.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: autoload (was: Re: Against the Tide of Common LISP)
Message-ID: <254@su-russell.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 19-Feb-87 03:01:29 EST
Article-I.D.: su-russe.254
Posted: Thu Feb 19 03:01:29 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Feb-87 06:50:54 EST
Organization: Stanford University, CSLI
Lines: 17

Stan Shebs is correct in saying that complex function
inter-dependencies can cause poor paging behavior; however,
autoloading doesn't help this problem one bit. In fact, it can
actually aggravate the problem by paging in many useless objects.
Autoloading is a poor substitute for a good virtual memory system
because the grain size is too large - you generally must load a
complete group of related functions and you must waste time parsing
the binary file format at run time. Virtual memory avoids both of
these problems. I'm only arguing against autoloading in a good virtual
memory system, though.

Many popular operating systems do not have wonderful virtual memory
systems. UNIX, for example, handles large processes so poorly that I
might argue that autoloading *is* a good idea when writing a Lisp to
run on it.

Wade