Re: [Axiom-developer] CCL maintenance.

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Wed, 30 May 2007, Stephen Wilson wrote:

| Gabriel Dos Reis <address@hidden> writes:
| > The slowness of GCL is another irritating aspect of working on current
| > Axiom code base.
| > 
| > Please, don't tell me you're not concerned about wasting developer's time.
| 
| Oh no. Though GCL may not be super-duper-fast when it comes to compile
| times, there are may opportunities for speeding up the build which at
| the same time have other benefits.  For example, eliminating dead
| code.  I looked at the email archives w.r.t saturn and the majority of
| the posts were discussing how to remove the connection to the system so
| that a windows build was possible.

I don't know if that is of any help but Axiom.build-improvements builds and
works with $saturn set to the same value as for Unix systems.

| Though not dead strictly speaking,
| Im looking at removing the nag fortran library support, which appears
| quite straight forward to do.  

I would not mind if they went away.

| Im sure you could aticipate this, but I suspect that getting Boot out
| of the picture and eliminating (understand, this is just my
| perspective) a significant layer of indirection would _significantly_
| reduce compile times.  I would not be surprised if a lisp rewrite saw
| the SPAD compiler build time drop to 15-20 minutes (I think this is a
| conservative estimate).  If done properly, the algebra build could
| drop significantly as well.
| 
| In short, I dont blame GCL for axioms long build times.

In all my measurements, the Boot-to-Lisp translation takes up non-significant
part of the build.  All the measurements I've done show the compilation of
Lisp codes  take major proportion.  I don't think it is because of the quality
of Lisp generated.

As you know I don't believe in clean, easy modifiable, and maintainable Axiom
written in Lisp.  Lisp is just too low level.  For one thing, the verbosity
(I'm not talking of parenthesis) obscures the main ideas; its primitivity
drags further down.  But, I've said enough on the subject already.

-- Gaby