[Openmcl-devel] Cocoa environment statup speed-up?

[Gary Byers]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, Sebastian Nozzi wrote:

> Wow,
>
> I really wanted to thank you all for such insightfull answers.
> To compensate for the off-topic nature of my questions, here goes something
> more related to openMCL.
>
> Is it possible to initiate the Cocoa-IDE environment, save an image, and
> from then on initiate with that image so that it doesn't take so long to
> load all the Cocoa stuff? Of course this wouldn't show the Cocoa-IDE, just
> load all the memory contents; but maybe there's a way, after loading the
> image, to gain access to it, by calling a function or doing some other
> initialization steps.

There's an "example":

"ccl:examples;cocoa-application.lisp"

that saves an image inside the "ccl:OpenMCL.app" application bundle; when
you then double-click on that bundle, it should start up a lot quicker
than the original call to

? (require "COCOA")

did.

There are at least two problems with this:

1) in Panther (OSX 10.3), the OS may have already decided that OpenMCL.app
wasn't a valid executable bundle and cached the results of this conclusion.
"Touching" (changing the modification time) of the application bundle
seems to cause this conclusion to be re-evaluated:

shell> touch OpenMCL.app

2) Because of the way that the ObjC bridge currently works (the ways
in which it builds it model of what ObjC classes and methods exist and
the way that this information is integrated with CLOS), a saved image
is dependent on the -exact- versions of the Cocoa libraries that were
present when it was saved (e.g., something saved under OSX 10.3.2
doesn't work under 10.3.3).

>
> I wonder if something along those lines is possible. Or maybe you have been
> using it all the time and I didn't know of it.

Mikel Evins and others have been working on other approaches to creating
bundled applications (and other things); some of these projects were hosted
on common-lisp.net, which seems to still be recovering from a system
compromise.

>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Sebastian
>
>
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