Re: [Axiom-developer] Axiom next release

[Mike Dewar]

Tim is right that compiling Axiom can take a long time but on a more
modern machine and using CCL (which is *much* faster than gcc because it
compiles to byte code and doesn't launch a C compilation for every file)
it was taking us maybe 1 or 2 hours to rebuild all the algebra.  This
didn't include the bootstrap process which you guys are presumably doing
or any extra LaTeXing that the new pamphlets require of course.

I'd strongly recommend using CCL for your development system if you can.
Not only is it the platform for the last NAG build but its smaller,
leaner and as I've said compiles code much faster.  Although in theory
akcl/gcl code runs faster in practice we found that you rarely got the
benefit because the image was so much bigger and as a result the Axiom
interpsys process swapped a lot more.  WIth CCL you can compile
performance-critical parts of the libraries into the kernel (which
roughly doubles the execution speed unless the functions are very small
in which case the incresed overhead of calling compiled functions
cancels this out), and as a result the first CCL-based version we
shipped ran our test suite faster than the previous AKCL version.  Of
course machines are bigger and faster today so this may not be such an
issue any more.

The biggest drawback with CCL was debugging the byte-code interpreter
where neither a source-level tool looking at the C or the lisp-level
tools gave us much of a clue as to what was going on. 

Well done getting integer arithmetic to work!  It sounds like you're
making good progress.

Cheers, Mike.

On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 06:26:26PM -0500, Tim Daly wrote:
> David,
> 
> There can't be a cycle of dependencies at the level of the Makefile.
> I compile every file each time it is added to the Makefile and again
> after I've added a set. Each file is independent, except at the
> pamphlet level. So there can't be cycles in the algebra compile.
> 
> Axiom is huge. You're only building a portion of it so far. 
> Non-linux compiles (or linux compiles on a machine with not a lot
> of free memory) are going to take hours. Linux caches a LOT of the
> disk transfers where Windows does not. The SUN build used to 
> reload interpsys from disk every time as well as all of the loaded
> files. Each algebra file compile would take 2 minutes or more which
> gets into big numbers when you compile thousands of files. I've seen
> an Axiom build on a SUN box take 24 hours even though I'd already
> cached all possible work (hence the religious use of the intermediate
> directory). I never built a SUN version from scratch.
> 
> Tim
> 
> 
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