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Re: Guile & PR


Russ McManus <russell.mcmanus@gs.com> writes:

> Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@nada.kth.se> writes:
> 
> > BTW, is it possible to let Guile dump a boot image on systems which
> > support that?  I have a vague memory that it interfered with dynamic
> > linking..., but it would really improve things a lot.
> 
> I have played with unexec some myself, and I can say for certain that
> it works on Solaris, and probably some other platforms.  I also have
> been told that Bernard Urban has integrated unexec into guile-hobbit,
> so this seems possible.
> 
> The hardest part, I would guess, is the autoconf stuff needed to get
> everything built on all platforms.  Just today in fact, I tried to
> figure out how this works in emacs-20.3, and the going was slow...

When I examined unexec lo, many moons ago, it was necessary to unexec
*before* any libraries were dynamically loaded.  (My guess is it
didn't correctly fix up pointers to objects in the dynamic library).
This was a problem in the specific case of readline support (ugh,
worms) which was dynamically loaded at bootup in my interpreter. 

Has anyone fixed this problem?  Was it ever real?  Did my hardware
just put bad juju on it? 

A general unexec system is a good idea, since there may be non-trivial
computational tasks that need to be run on bootup (constructing parser
DFAs, say)

Andrew Archibald
aarchiba@csclub.uwaterloo.ca