Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!versatc!leadsv!laic!hitchhiker!darin From: darin@hitchhiker.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson) Newsgroups: comp.emacs Subject: Re: Does GNU emacs ever use shared libraries? Message-ID: <563@laic.UUCP> Date: 19 May 89 17:54:39 GMT References: <152@talarian.UUCP> <6006@xyzzy.UUCP> <40094@bbn.COM> Sender: news@laic.UUCP Reply-To: darin@hitchhiker.UUCP (Darin Johnson) Distribution: usa Organization: Lockheed AI Center, Menlo Park, CA Lines: 24 >>There is an >>option when building GNU emacs not to build xemacs this way, but >>enabling the option means that EVERY time you start emacs, it must >>reload the lisp files. This takes ~5 minutes on a loaded .5 Mips >>machine. > >It struck me that the way to build emacs is to make the compiled, >loaded elisp into a shared library. The VMS version just creates a dump file that is the data created while reading in the lisp files. The normal running version is the same executable that is used to build the dump file. When run normally, a dump file is specified, and that is loaded in. This won't work as well in UNIX since you would always have to have an alias (you have to have one anyway in VMS). The same method is used for VMS TeX. I compiled it with the shared C library without too many problems (but Sun shared libraries may have other problems). Using this method, the dump portion can be paged to the normal swap device, even though the text portion may not (if you have a local swap disk, but load emacs over NFS, this may make a big difference). Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com) We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.