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From: ali@rocky.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Getting smaller binaries
Message-ID: <235@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Wed, 15-Apr-87 13:46:13 EST
Article-I.D.: rocky.235
Posted: Wed Apr 15 13:46:13 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Apr-87 01:06:18 EST
References: <1108@rpics.RPI.EDU>
Reply-To: ali@rocky.UUCP (Ali Ozer)
Distribution: world
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 47

In article <1108@rpics.RPI.EDU> guilford@rpics.RPI.EDU (Jim Guilford) writes:
>  I was thinking that a large part of binaries tends to be large chunks of
>library code such as printf and its associated luggage. I was thinking that
>it may not be too bad of idea to make most of these large "add-ons" into a
>real amiga-style library, and then have all programs share it. I can see
>very little reason for the simple "hello" program from K&R to take up lots
>and lots of space, specially when most of the code in the binary is in every
>other binary on the disk.

I was thinking along the same lines. I'm working on a Lisp compiler (a class
project) for the Dec-20, and I was wondering how difficult it would be to
port it to the Amiga. Then I started thinking along the lines of
creating a "lisp.library," which would have all of the Lisp stuff and
allow you to run Lisp "executables" without the use of the interpreted Lisp
environment. Also, last night, at the Stanford Amiga Project meeting,
we had one of the developers of JForth talk to us about JForth, and he
mentioned that currently the only way to get stand-alone programs (ie,
independent of the Forth environment) was to do a "save," which essentially
dumps the whole environment into an executable file, resulting in
huge executables. [Note: I am not saying anything against JForth here.
We played with it a bit last night, and I was very pleased with the
product. Creation of stand-along executables from interpreted languages
is usually either impossible, or you get huge executables, like in this
case, or you end up doing what AmigaBasic does --- You click on the
icon for a Basic program, and the Basic is started up in which your program
is run.]

In any case, Amiga libraries are wonderful things and I would love to 
see them used as you describe --- Ie, to store a lot of the stuff that
normally would get linked in with your code. In fact, if you think about
it, most of us probably run at least 3 or 4 C programs concurrently
(say a clock, a load average program, emacs, system monitor, hanoi, etc...),
so a library would result in a lot of savings. 

Hmm, I seem to remember reading that Absoft Fortran already does this...
Is this true? 

To get around the problem of creating truly stand alone products (ie,
ones you could execute without the library), you probably would still
need the option of linking in the code with your program. 

I haven't answered any of your questions about whether this is possible
or not for C, but I am excited about the idea and hope it works... I will
think further about the application of the idea in creating Lisp
executables.

Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu